Wings Over Scotland

The indyref sometimes caused feelings to run rather high, and people on both sides made themselves very unpopular with those on the other side. But four years of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and not everyone is still in the same trenches.

Some high-profile names have switched to from No to Yes (often but not exclusively as a result of Brexit), and the reception afforded to floor-crossers like Murray Foote, Eric Joyce, Jackie Kemp, Mike Dailly, Tom Morton and Simon Pia hasn’t always been an entirely warm one, with some unable to keep a lid on their old grudges.

And in a similar vein, some of the remarks in recent days on the reported switch to Yes of Billy Connolly – a few from people I thought better of – are deeply offensive and potentially deeply damaging.

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Today:

But that’s only fair, because after all – oh:

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Well well, look who suddenly believes in second referendums.

It’s fascinating to note how you can completely reverse Kezia Dugdale’s position on the subject simply by substituting the word “Scotland” for the words “the UK” in that second tweet, and imagine she was talking about the independence march in heavily-Remain-voting Edinburgh earlier this month instead of the (proportionately smaller) one in London yesterday.

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The BBC’s Scottish politics website today prominently carries this story:

Our famously alert readers may recall as far back as five-and-a-half months ago, which was the last time the Scottish media tried to whip up demented scare stories about baby boxes, which have been given to every new mother in Finland for approximately 70 years and caused absolutely no documented problems.

So what’s fresh about the story to justify this significant new coverage? Let’s see.

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Tory MP Kirstene “dumber than a box of” Hair is best known for being the member of the UK Parliament who didn’t vote in the Brexit referendum because it was too difficult.

But today she’s made a tilt at a different title.

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The Scottish Daily Mail today has a big headline relaying the seemingly-unambiguous bad news that unemployment in Scotland has apparently risen by 11,000.

But cheer up, folks, because better times are ahead.

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We’re pretty sure it was “Listen to you about being ‘better together’, so that they ended up with a Tory government they didn’t vote for but which was imposed on them by the people in a much larger country, and which has a long track record of imposing brutal, callous welfare policies on the poor for largely ideological reasons, and which has entirely predictably continued to do so”.

It’s not rocket science, hen.

We’re blacklisted by the press regulator IPSO, but fortunately when we raise issues with especially blatant inaccuracies in UK newspapers alert readers sometimes take up the cudgel and file complaints with them because we can’t.

One such case was when the Daily Express published a story this summer with the eye-rubbing and creatively-capitalised headline “MAJORITY of Scots BACK BREXIT as SNP support PLUMMETS from voters backing Ruth Davidson”.

And, y’know, that’s not a very true thing to say.

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When indoor-hat-wearing uberYoon nutter George Galloway appeared in some of the madder corners of the gutter press this week after appearing on RT to extravagantly belittle last weekend’s indy marchers, we didn’t bother talking about it because who cares what that irrelevant old zoomer thinks, right?

But when an alert reader drew our attention to this spectacular clip of Galloway’s pre-indyref and post-indyref views on the EU we couldn’t let it go, because it so perfectly encapsulates not just what a huge buffoon George Galloway is, but the jaw-dropping, bare-faced, crass hypocrisy of so much Unionist argument.

We’re only sad he’s neither a politician nor in Scotland, or he’d be a shoo-in.

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We knew this would be a fast-moving phenomenon when we created it, but we’re only just beginning to realise the magnitude of the rod we’ve made for our own backs. Because the supply of rock-headed clownshows sucking up taxpayers’ money on the opposition benches at Holyrood appear to be effectively infinite.

There’s only actually one “l” in “intolerable”, but that’s still the intellectual high point of the tweet. It really is hard to adequately convey what a brainless piece of idiocy this is without just swearing for a solid hour, but we’ll try.

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We felt sure that our awarding of the inaugural Thickest Politician In Scotland title this morning would be taken as the throwing down of a gauntlet, and we weren’t wrong. Because within just hours, the Prince Regent had staked his claim to the crown.

Greene – who was rejected by the voters of Cunninghame North by almost 9,000 votes but sits in Parliament anyway – is in fact supposed to serve the people of the West Scotland region as a list MSP, not the whole country, and we’re not aware of any breakdown of how Scotland’s eight list regions voted in 2014 so we have no idea how many voted No in WS. But that’s by far the least idiotic part of the tweet.

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