Wings Over Scotland

We’re seriously starting to think there’s some sort of competition going on among the Unionist parties of Scotland to see who’s the thickest. We’ve spent quite a bit of time pointing out the scarcely-believable dimness of the Scottish Conservative benches, but this week Scottish Labour really pulled out the stops to try to seize back the initiative.

As a warm-up act they came out swinging with one of their big hitters (which for taste reasons we’ve expressed as rhyming slang) in the form of our dear old pal and former Edinburgh South CLP chair Duncan Hothersall – last seen attacking a six-year-old girl for selling 50p cups of lemonade to thirsty festivalgoers – who impressively contrived to badly lose an argument with a bridge.

But hilarious as that was, it wasn’t the high point by a distance.

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Yesterday was quite an eventful day, so it’s moderately possible you may have missed the alarming news that some shady Mafia-backed hedge fund or such has apparently funded these irresponsible and morally-suspect chancers (last seen shilling on air for literally Vladimir Putin and BBC Scotland, in that order) to produce an all-new series of scurrilous and dubious fact-grubbing for some inexplicable reason.

We have alerted the appropriate authorities. For safety, remain in your homes.

Because the World Cup starts today, and with these guys doing our job for us, we’re not really sure we need to be here.

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Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.

And it didn’t even go down fighting.

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A little over five years ago.

Strengthen, destroy, what’s a little slip of the tongue between friends?

It’s probably fair to say that the voters of Scotland have been feeling a little put-upon lately. In the last decade they’ve been sent to polling stations on no fewer than 12 occasions (Holyrood elections in 2011 and 2016, UK elections in 2010, 2015 and 2017, council elections in 2012 and 2017, European elections in 2009 and 2014, and finally referendums on AV, independence and the EU).

And they’ve been subjected to endless weeks, months or even years of campaigning and haranguing each time. One woman – who only had to endure nine of those 12 – had famously had enough of it.

Yet Scots face possibly three more in the next 12 months or so, if various factions get their way, taking the total to 15 major votes in a decade. And if we want to secure the desired outcome in any of them, we’re going to have to ease the load on folk a bit.

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This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.

The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.

Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.

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Some new data from the long-running Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was released tonight, and it makes for fascinating reading.

The headline stat is that for only the second year in the 18 years the study has been running, independence is the most popular option for the governance of Scotland:

This doesn’t, however, mean that it’s the majority view, because while independence is backed by 45% the “No” option is split into two – support for devolution (41%) and those ultra-Yoons who want Holyrood abolished (8%).

Now, considering that as recently as 2012 those figures were independence on 23%, devolution 61% and no Parliament 13%, that’s still a remarkable shift in Scottish public opinion in a very short space of time – support for indy has DOUBLED in five years while devolution has dropped by a third.

And indeed, when the survey asked a straight Yes/No question the results came out even closer, at 48% Yes to 52% No – a 3% swing to Yes from the 2016 figures.

No wonder the Unionists are extra-twitchy lately.

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We’re having a lot of trouble with this one, to be honest.

The Record, along with Scottish Labour and a lot of the left of social media, are up in arms that a mystery benefactor has donated a £230,000 Rolls Royce to Glasgow City Council for the use of the Lord Provost. But nobody can quite manage to explain why they’re so angry about it.

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We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.

Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.

But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.

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So this story is the front page of tonight’s Evening Times.

It’s a pretty slim piece deploying a Glasgow mother to attack the SNP-run city council over a recent increase in nursery fees, and it sounds like the new higher cost might be a pretty big deal to her.

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And no, we don’t even mean the FOUR spelling mistakes in this 42-word tweet.

We mean the bit that we’ve highlighted above in blue. Because what Scottish Labour’s lowest-watt bulb was gloating about earlier today was that Lord Bracadale concluded there’d been no gap created in the law by the Kelly-driven abolition of the OBFA.

And that’s… well, that’s not quite what Lord Bracadale said.

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