After months of phony war, we’re actually about to find out something concrete about the current state of Scottish politics.
The omens aren’t massively auspicious.
Someone tweeted this today:
We were curious to find out what we’d said, but it seems to have been expunged from The National’s website. We eventually managed to track the email down in our vaults, though, so just as a bit of a change, here it is, as a reminder of a different time.
The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.
The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.
The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.
But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.
You can’t do this, you know. You just can’t.
These things cannot both be true.
Holiday Boy is sadly incapacitated today – ironically, having injured himself on his last holiday – but fortunately we do have some graphical content for you, having just been leaked this copy of the SNP’s campaign poster for the next general election.
You can almost smell the mince and carrots, can’t you?
Last night a by-election hustings was held in Rutherglen to which all 14 candidates were invited to hear and answer questions from the electorate on women’s issues. The SNP, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates all declined to attend. But the SNP, at least, was represented at the event.
Or at any rate, just outside it.
The Scottish National Party, in legal character, is what’s known as an unincorporated association. (The same form of entity as Wings, local colour fans.)
This has a number of interesting ramifications.
To be honest it barely seems worth marking the ninth anniversary of the indyref. The day our nation – albeit narrowly – bottled out of becoming a real one again is nothing to be celebrated. The supposed party of independence has run away from the fight, concerned only with feathering its own nest, and its era of power looks to be drawing to a bitter and deserved close.
But there remains one grave and glaring grievance.
And no matter what anyone says, it’ll dog democracy and condemn Scottish politics to eternal stagnation until it’s addressed.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
