Wings Over Scotland

We’ve got no words for this, so we’ll let it stand by itself.

Because 55% voted No. Welcome to Brexit.

STV News gets the new year off to a cheery start today:

The headline, as alert readers will be accustomed to by now, is a flat-out lie. As far as the article reveals – and there’s nothing on the company’s website offering any more detail, nor in the longer quotes we found elsewhere – chartered accountants French Duncan LLP have in fact made no predictions whatsoever as to the number of Scottish insolvencies in 2019, merely recorded the number that took place in 2018.

STV’s claim that the 2018 figure of 12,000 “could be even higher by the end of 2019” appears, then, to have been entirely invented. But the depressing tone – which the Daily Express turns into a full-blown crisis, roping in Murdo Fraser for some SNP BAD rentaguff along the way – is even more inexplicable than simple fabrication.

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The last two years, particularly 2018, have been a pretty miserable time in the annals of Scottish independence. Not because support has fallen – it hasn’t budged an inch, however much Unionists might try to desperately convince themselves otherwise – but because there hasn’t, in essence, been anything we could usefully do.

Faced with a brick wall of “now is not the time” intransigence from a UK government elected by England and determined to frustrate the democratic will of the Scottish Parliament, we could talk all we wanted but had no means to determine our own fate, locked in the boot of a car speeding towards a cliff edge with a lunatic at the wheel.

That age – and it’s felt like an age – is very nearly at an end.

It’s time to get ready.

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An alert reader spotted this today:

Because with Scottish Labour, lying is for life, not just Christmas.

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We can think of no better illustrative metaphor for the brain-withering idiot festival that was 2018 than page 16 of today’s Sunday Mail, which in the space of a single inch of newsprint predicts both SNP gains at any new general election, and then SNP losses to the exact same Labour and Tory parties that the editorial on the left excoriates as incompetent, “deluded” and “moribund”.

We wish we could rationally hope 2019 will be any better.

To anyone observing Scottish politics with even half a keen eye, it was obvious from very early on that former athlete Brian Whittle was one of the stupider and nastier elements of the 2016 crop of new Tory MSPs, having been thrashed by more than 12,400 votes in the election but foisted on taxpayers anyway via the list system.

(Trivia fact: Whittle is Holyrood’s most comprehensively rejected MSP. Nobody else in the 2016 election was beaten by such a big margin but still ended up in Parliament. He makes Murdo Fraser – who lost Perthshire North by 10,353 in his seventh defeat on the trot but still got a seat – look like a beacon of popularity by comparison.)

Indeed, an interview in today’s Holyrood Magazine reveals that Whittle is SUCH a dim bulb, he didn’t even realise that if you got elected as an MSP you had to actually go and do the job.

But astoundingly, that’s not even nearly the dumbest thing he says in it.

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It should now be abundantly clear to any rational person that time has very nearly run out to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

Theresa May has been sent swiftly home from Europe with a skelped arse and told that any further negotiation is out of the question. But she’s insisted that the meaningful vote in the UK parliament on her Brexit deal won’t now happen before Christmas, which in practical terms means before mid-January.

That means that if Labour wait until the deal is thrown out before they call a vote of no confidence – which is their current position, so far as anyone can tell what their position is – then by the time the government falls it’ll already be February.

(Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, after a successful VoNC there are 14 days for someone to try to form an alternative administration before an election is called.)

Add in the six weeks minimum that are required for an election campaign and you’re halfway through March, literally just a few days before the UK will automatically crash out of the EU with no deal.

Even if a couple of months extension of Article 50 were to be granted – and we’re not sure who’d be asking by that stage – that’s plainly nowhere near enough time for a new government to come up with anything the EU would agree to.

(Remember that the withdrawal agreement was supposed to be done and dusted by October in order to give the EU six months to ratify it. Their patience with the UK is plainly at an end, and it’s hard to see them agreeing to drag the whole mess out for another year or more, which would be the realistic timescale.)

“And that’s all very well”, readers might be thinking at this point, “but that’s a picture of Kezia Dugdale, an insignificant backbench Holyrood list MSP. What the bloody hell’s it got to do with her?”

And the answer is that it’s all her fault.

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We must admit we haven’t been keeping fully up to date with our Thickest Politician In Scotland rankings recently, mainly because they’ve been so deluged with submissions that we can barely scratch the backlog.

This month alone, for example, we’ve seen Murdo Fraser try to blame the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems for his party’s shambolic Brexit fiasco, millionaire Tory landowner Sir Edward Mountain sneering that the SNP’s Ian Blackford is too rich because he has a Range Rover, James Kelly of Labour humiliating himself (again) over the budget and boneheaded Lib Dem barrel-scraping Christine Jardine mocking someone for having an inferior intellect while she failed to even nearly spell the word “supporters”.

And that’s before we even get to the Tory MSP who stood up at this afternoon’s FMQs and suggested that lowering the drink-drive limit had somehow led to an increase in road traffic accidents, presumably in the belief that it would actually be better and safer if everyone bombing up and down Scotland’s motorways had had a few beers first.

But pretenders are one thing. There’s still an undisputed king.

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Q: Why did Scottish Labour refuse to propose a costed alternative budget yesterday?

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On one level you have to feel a bit sorry for Scottish Unionists. Having believed until very late in the day that they’d win a crushing victory in the 2014 indyref and put the matter to bed for a century, they’ve never been able to relax since.

And this week the fear has them well and truly in its grip.

The hapless Scottish Secretary demonstrated the lack of self-awareness for which he’s famous when he said at the weekend that the thing he warned would threaten the Union (a defeat for the PM’s Brexit deal) was going to happen on Tuesday, at which point – having said he’d resign if the Union was threatened – he’s made it absolutely clear that he ISN’T going to resign.

And he wasn’t alone in the panic room.

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Brexit isn’t really this site’s remit, which is why we’ve been relatively quiet in recent weeks as the UK’s shambolic exit from the EU hogs all the news and Scottish politics has been relegated to a largely-dormant backwater in the press.

Yes supporters don’t speak with one voice on the EU, and while we’re in favour of it we’ve long said that the indy movement can’t really move on until the fog clears and we know for sure what Brexit’s going to look like. Deciding whether to be part of the EU should be a decision for an independent Scotland to make, not a precondition.

But dear lord, this is such a mess it needs to be examined.

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