Wings Over Scotland

The media is aflame this morning with discussion of the agreement between the UK and EU with particular regard to Ireland, in which the UK essentially concedes just about everything including free movement, the thing most Brexiters voted Leave for.

We’ve largely avoided analysis of the Brexit negotiations here on Wings up until now, because there’s been a raft of people who are far more expert on the subject than us doing it at enormous length, very little of it directly concerned Scotland, and so nobody really needed our tuppence-worth. But this one’s big.

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Yesterday at Holyrood the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in the name of Orkney MSP Liam McArthur, brought forward a motion of no confidence in Police Scotland, which was calmly but stingingly rebutted by Scottish Police Federation chair Calum Steele on Twitter. A debate went ahead in the chamber, of which the outcome was the below:

So the Lib Dems lost, Labour lost, the Greens lost, the Tories lost and the SNP lost. We’re glad that’s all cleared up and was a valuable use of everyone’s time, then.

On today’s news that support for independence is back up to 47%, and that Henry McLeish is calling for federalism again, whatever that is.

(NB In 2009 apparently “home rule” actually meant “independence”. Keep up.)

Scotland has 2,174 miles of trunk roads, of which 1.7 miles (that’s just under 0.08%) comprise the Queensferry Crossing. For the next few days those 1.7 miles are going to be subject to some partial lane closures on the southbound side for maintenance.

They’ll cause almost no disruption, because as it happens there’s another very similar bridge conveniently located just a couple of hundred yards away – linked directly to all the same roads – that traffic will use instead.

Not much of a story, is it? We don’t know how many miles of Scotland’s roads have roadworks on them on any given day of any given week, but we suspect it’s quite a lot. It tends not to make the news beyond a few seconds on the traffic bulletin at the end, but today was different.

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Cash is tight in Scotland’s Unionist-run councils.

If only there was something they could do to bring more money in, something they’ve been demanding the Scottish Government do for at least the last seven years and which the councils now have the power to do for themselves.

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God bless ’em, they just never lose the faith, do they?

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Back in the summer we sang the praises of one of Scotland’s tiny semi-handful of pro-independence print organs, the splendid iScot. So it seems only fair that we should offer the same courtesy to the other one we mentioned at the time, The National. It’s three years old today – how the time’s flown – and its editor Callum Baird wants your support. Over to him.

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We wouldn’t say that the Scottish Daily Mail was obsessed or anything, but this is just today’s hysterical coverage of possible changes to taxation in Scotland which haven’t even been PROPOSED yet, let alone actually passed into law.

A couple of bits caught our eye in particular.

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The efforts by the Scottish Tories to pull off some frankly ambitious shenanigans over today’s Budget continued overnight in increasingly bizarre fashion.

As with the Poppy Scotland funding, the party appears to be quite openly punting the line “We knew all along that this was possible and the right thing to do, but we deliberately punished Scotland for not electing enough Tory MPs”, in what can only be reasonably interpreted as an attempt at blackmailing future electorates.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is doing its best to sell the issue as “a plague on both their houses”, holding the Scottish Government and UK government equally culpable for the mess. So let’s see what we know.

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Yesterday’s edition of the Scottish Mail On Sunday devoted most of a page to a weird column from Ruth Davidson (in which she appeared to believe that Alex Salmond was still the First Minister), crowing about the great deal that Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs have supposedly won for Scotland in this week’s coming budget.

The first alleged fruits of the deal were revealed today.

That tweet is quite disturbing in itself, because what it unmistakeably implies is that if Scotland had voted for more SNP MPs in June and fewer Tories, the UK government would have retaliated by spitefully punishing innocent war veterans.

And Poppy Scotland weren’t too pleased about being weaponised either.

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This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.

Alex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.

The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.

(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.)

Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood.

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