Wings Over Scotland

Drew Hendry won a lot of praise from Yes supporters a few days ago when he seized the Mace in the Commons. It’s not easy to speak in the chamber at any time and doing so in the face of hostility from the Speaker is challenging indeed.

The institution of Parliament is, by its very design, geared towards control by the British establishment. Not only are all sides uniformly hostile, but even the staff and officials, usually so polite and deferential, turn on you. So it was an intimidatory atmosphere in which he acted and it can’t have been easy.

But the idea that Scottish MPs should routinely require to suffer the scorn and derision poured upon their nation and their people is long past its sell-by date. Much of the vitriol shouted wouldn’t be countenanced elsewhere and just because it’s supposedly Honourable Members who act in that manner doesn’t justify it. There comes a time when words aren’t enough.

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Dr Tim Rideout is one of the most serious and respected people in the Yes movement and the SNP. As convener of the Scottish Currency Group he’s presently engaged in trying to solve the party’s self-inflicted weakness over its lack of a coherent currency policy, and he’s sufficiently highly rated by SNP members that earlier this month he was elected to the party’s Policy Development Committee.

So you might think he was entitled to a view on, well, development of policy.

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If this site seems to spend most of its time being angry at the SNP these days, that’s because we are. And a large part of that is because there’s very little that hacks us off more than people insulting our intelligence.

Smith’s tweet is just a crassly offensive flat-out lie. This week’s vote is NOT about “EU membership”. The United Kingdom hasn’t been a member of the EU since 31 January. We’ve already left and there’s no going back. The vote is about whether we leave with a sliver of a trade deal slightly reducing the self-inflicted harm, or the total catastrophe of no deal at all, and it’s just crushingly embarrassing for all concerned that Smith thinks so little of his own supporters as to believe he can “frame” it otherwise.

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WIDER YES MOVEMENT: Hey, why don’t some of you SNP guys come along to this event and have a friendly chat about how we can all achieve our common goal?

THE SNP: Get back in your box and mind your business, oiks.

Next year’s going to be bumpy, folks.

Honestly hard to say who’s trying to wind up Yes supporters the most here.

We’ll leave it to you to decide.

With precisely the grim level of cynicism we’ve now come to expect as standard, the Scottish Government has released a key document relating to the Salmond inquiry two days before Christmas, hoping it’ll be buried in the ongoing coronavirus-and-Brexit-related implosion of the UK.

The document, which contains legal advice relating to the judicial review brought by Salmond regarding the Scottish Government’s investigations into false allegations of misconduct against him, is extremely heavily redacted. But a few interesting passages remain, so let’s have some fun.

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There was a time, readers, when we’d have bothered ourselves to dig out the whole series of headlines and links for this.

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Oh just shut up you useless waste of space.

He DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK. You can bleat at him for a thousand years and he won’t listen. You gave him his election and he has a majority and England has chosen its fate and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them dragging us down with them because you’ve wasted the last four years whining about it instead of doing the thing we elected you to do, which is put us in charge of our own future forever.

Now either get off your worthless coward’s arse and do the only thing that’s actually in your power – a plebiscitary election – instead of grandstanding around the world stage achieving absolutely sod-all except getting your face in the press again, or get out of our damn way and let someone who can do the job take over.

(PS that also includes the job of handling the pandemic, which you’re making a pig’s arse of too, but gosh, doesn’t everyone love how telegenically you’re presenting the thousands of needless deaths? New Zealand has had just TWENTY-FIVE with near enough the same population, because their leader had the courage to make the tough calls you failed to because the Selfie Queen can’t bear to be unpopular.)

And no, we haven’t been drinking. Not a drop. We’ve just had enough.

As it happened, it was fortuitous that this story intervened and stopped us writing the story we meant to run yesterday, because now we’ve got a two-for-the-price-of-one on the increasingly farcical insanity running riot in the offices of the Scottish Government.

Alert readers will have noticed the above piece from today’s Times, revealing that the Scottish Government just can’t seem to stop breaking the rules (and squandering huge vats of taxpayers’ money in the process) when it comes to Alex Salmond.

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There’s been a very longstanding grumble from independence supporters about the way the BBC displays its weather map, but today we saw a bit of footage from the UK general election a year ago this week that depicts the Corporation’s view of the country more truthfully than ever before. We thought we’d share it with you for fun.

Screw your eyes up a bit and you can still just about see where you are.

On 8 December this site ran an article about the Chief Executive Officer of the Scottish National Party, Peter Murrell. It has recently been drawn to our attention that the piece contained a serious inaccuracy, which we would like to remedy.

Because as it turns out, Peter Murrell IS a liar.

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