Wings Over Scotland

On the 1st of January, Chinese authorities took the decision to close the Wuhan food market. The following day, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, were confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus) which we now know as COVID-19.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a New Year message, from the private island of Mustique in the Caribbean, that the “first item” on his agenda remained his commitment to take Britain out of the EU by the end of January.

Within weeks the virus had spread across the world to many countries including Italy, Germany, Australia, the USA and of course the UK.

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We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.

Which is just two months after this happened:

So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.

As we still haven’t received any response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we sent this letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice today. Some passages have been redacted in accordance with contempt-of-court law.

We hope he’s listening.

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In a shock finding that’s sure to provoke soul-searching and recriminations at SNP HQ, it appears that the Scottish Government actually has a new policy that’s backed by a majority of the Scottish public.

Honestly, we were as surprised as you.

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We lost a few quid to Graham Linehan at poker this afternoon and we needed a wee bit of cheering up, so God bless the SNP Twitler Youth for coming to our rescue.

Okay, now we’re worried.

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As overt direct interference by unelected, unaccountable foreign media corporations in national politics continues to intensify, readers of Wings will be aware that it’s now considerably more difficult for us to even let you know when we have a new post up.

(Obviously this isn’t quite so much of an issue when we’re on holiday – which despite the flurry of activity in the last week or so we still officially are, since the coronavirus has knackered everything up and unavoidably delayed the decision we’d planned to make last month – but the general principle remains alarming.)

So here are some things you can do.

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There’s a great quote from one of the founders of the SNP that Yes types are fond of using in response to the endless onslaught of brainless Unionist accusations that the independence movement is “anti-English”.

But we had no suspicion of just how remarkably true it was until now.

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It’s now more than a month since this site revealed the widespread breach by a number of Scottish journalists/newspapers – the most prominent being Dani Garavelli of Scotland On Sunday and Tortoise Media – of the legally-protected anonymity of one of the accusers in the Alex Salmond trial.

Until last week we’d had no response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) beyond an initial acknowledgement, and no action of any kind had apparently been taken against any of the perpetrators, even though the pro-Salmond blogger Craig Murray has been cited for prosecution for allegedly similar breaches.

Alarmingly, all of the information identifying the woman was (and at the time of writing this article is) still publicly available in their articles, exposing her to possible danger. So last week we got in touch with the COPFS to seek clarification.

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We were a bit startled to be leaked this early draft from the 2021 SNP manifesto:

We’re sure it’ll be softened up a bit in the editing process.

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It’s pretty interesting that today marks the first really tangible diversification between the Scottish and UK governments with regard to the coronavirus crisis: the Holyrood administration has rejected Westminster’s much-criticised new main slogan and will be sticking with the old “STAY HOME” message.

(Here at Wings we’re mainly upset that the extremely misguided new campaign will undermine our years-old pro-alertness position.)

Because what our latest Panelbase poll showed is that there’s a huge gulf between perception and reality in Scotland when it comes to virus strategy.

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Just an SNP activist tonight, saying that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament or not, and that it’s undemocratic for a new pro-indy party to stand democratically for election like any other and take seats from Unionists (as long as the SNP hold power in the devolved administration, of course).

Other SNP activists, meanwhile, are already openly trying to dig dirt and undermine the women leading the new party, which is only planning to contest list seats and therefore poses no threat to the SNP whatsoever. Does anyone still think the current SNP care about independence, rather than power?