Wings Over Scotland

Our favourite Scottish Labour activist and media starlet reacts to the news that the promises of a No vote saving the Clyde shipyards have turned out to be lies.

Let’s just be clear – that’s unequivocal, unambiguous support for condemning the Govan shipyards to certain death, losing thousands of Scottish jobs, going back on promises just months old, so long as it might save the UK Treasury a few quid which the current government would probably spend on more tax cuts for billionaires.

Well, if that doesn’t save a party currently languishing on an average of about 24% in the Scottish opinion polls and help to win back the trust and support of Scottish voters, we simply don’t know what will. Solidarity, brothers and sisters.

This man is still regularly invited on TV by both the BBC and STV as a serious pundit.

Were anyone to still be unsure of the fact that different rules of behaviour apply to Unionists and Yes supporters, we invite them to consider the evidence.

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Below is a clip from the short report on social media in the independence referendum that appeared on tonight’s STV News, and will apparently also air on Scotland Tonight. (You can see the whole thing here.)

Like every other media report of our article about Alex Johnstone MSP, it omits the bit where we explained WHY we called him some rude names, but in this case we’re happy to accept that that was for reasons of time.

The more interesting bit is Johnstone’s own comments, because the MSP’s reaction is a breathtaking piece of hypocritical dishonesty that seems to us to be entirely in keeping with the character of the man.

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Since we’re (reluctantly) talking about the odious and hateful side of the independence debate today, here’s crusading socialist MP and No campaigner George Galloway of the Respect party, retweeting a troll account depicting Chris and Colin Weir as a couple of fat pigs standing around in filth.

And on this occasion, the retweet IS an endorsement.

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We’ve never met Chris and Colin Weir, but judging by their actions alone, they’re the sort of people we should all aspire to be more like. Caring, decent and hard-working people all their lives, fate bestowed a great slice of fortune on them when they won £161m on the EuroMillions lottery in 2011.

Unlike others, they didn’t embark on an orgy of ostentatious consumption, decadence and waste. Shunning publicity, they enjoyed their windfall but also quietly got on with doing untold good for their local community, helping out their friends and family and neighbours. It’s doubtful we’ll ever know the full extent of their generosity. They’ve never sought recognition or thanks for the millions they’ve given away.

But at the very least, as a bare-minimum standard of humanity, they deserve better than to be traduced in the press by sewer-dwelling vermin like this:

The worthless fat trougher above is Alex Johnstone, a staunch defender of the bedroom tax who’s never managed to actually win an election in his own right but is nevertheless the Tory list MSP for North East Scotland, sponging off the taxpayer in the name of a democratic proportional representation that his party doggedly refuses to extend to the rest of the UK.

And what he did today is going to be the biggest test of our self-restraint in the 30 months since we started this website.

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We’ve quite frequently highlighted the ugly, irresponsible tone of the No campaign’s – and especially Labour’s – comments about “foreigners” in the independence debate. And the reason we do is because that sort of language feeds attitudes like these.

There is, sadly, more where that came from.

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We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.

But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.

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When someone sent us a collection of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Clutha tragedy late last year, we decided not to use them. It wasn’t for any great moral reason – we’ve previously highlighted despicable No-camp scumbags making political capital out of the deaths of innocent people – but we were just too sickened and sad (as most Scots were) to waste a moment’s thought on such human dregs.

As the Daily Mail ploughs on with its crusade against “vile cybernats”, though, it seemed worth pointing out for the record just what sort of a place the internet really is, and how pathetic its catalogue of mild swearwords and distaste is in that context.

Stop reading now if you’re easily upset.

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Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.

The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.

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The coalition government’s horrific new immigration bill passed its first hurdle in the House Of Commons last night by 303 votes to 18.

The administration that brought us vans touring cities telling foreigners to leave or be arrested, gangs of armed officers sweeping tube stations for any dark-skinned undesirables, British citizens being harassed by text message and incomers to Scotland met with UK Border Agency posters urging them to go home intends to make life even more wretched and intolerable for vulnerable refugees and people who want to come here and contribute to our economy and culture.

And Labour? Labour bravely abstained from the vote.

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Because frankly we could write 10,000 words and not say as much about the state of the United Kingdom in 2013 – and its future – as these two pictures do.

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