Wings Over Scotland

We’ll be honest with you, readers, we’re not looking forward to 2017 one little bit. It’s going to be the most tedious year in Scottish politics since we started this website, and perhaps since the advent of devolution.

Other than the mild distraction of the council elections in May – which are likely to be a bit of a damp squib due to the deadening effect of STV and the propensity of Labour and the Tories to do deals to keep the SNP out of power – pretty much nothing even a little bit interesting is going to happen.

All we ARE going to hear about is Brexit and the EU, over and over and over and over again, and everything we’re going to hear is the same empty, pointless, space-filling speculation we’ve already been hearing since June. So let’s just get it down, and then we can link to it every week and go and do something useful with our time instead.

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Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

Particularly alert readers may recall a phenomenon we haven’t covered much recently, whereby aspects of politics magically transform as they cross the border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. But this week we’ve had a sighting in a new area.

Sounds pretty bad for poor old Wales.

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Unionists got very excited last week about a YouGov poll for the Times which showed that not only had the post-Brexit bump in support for independence been undone, but that it was now (fractionally) below the level recorded in the indyref for the first time since the September 2014 vote.

(It was a slightly curious poll, with a massively disproportionate number – over 27% – of its respondents born outside Scotland, mostly from the rest of the UK, but it was weighted so that shouldn’t have been much of a factor. It also found majority support for a second EU referendum, despite a 30-point margin for Remain, but opposition to a second indyref despite the margin for the Union being just 12 points.)

Nevertheless, given that nothing’s happened since the end of June that ought to have damaged the case for Yes (the oil price is currently at a 12-month high, for example, almost twice what it was in January), the 10% drop in support is a troubling one for the independence movement.

But it shouldn’t be. Because what the poll shows is that there is currently a majority of people in Scotland prepared to vote for independence.

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Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

The Prime Minister of the UK, whose party has one MP in Scotland, officially tells the Commons that she doesn’t believe people on benefits should be able to survive.

Happy St Andrews’ Day, readers.

St Andrew is of course the patron saint of ALL of Scotland. He doesn’t belong to the SNP, or to nationalists, but to everyone in the country.

So it hardly even seems worth pointing this out, really.

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Paul Nuttall (pictured below playing “Eddie Hitler” in the BBC sitcom “Bottom”) has just been elected by a landslide as the new leader of UKIP.

We’ve never felt more British, frankly.

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There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.

It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.

This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:

Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.

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Regular readers of this site will be impressed, if perhaps less than astonished, at the new high score achieved this week in the timeless game of McTernan Predicts:

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There’s a very interesting blog by Douglas Fraser on the BBC website today, pointing out exactly how vague and non-committal yesterday’s “announcement” by UK defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon regarding the long-awaited order of a reduced number of Type 26 frigates for the BAE shipyards in Govan was.

It might explain this extraordinary interview Fallon (alongside a very bad-tempered and unnamed PR goon), gave to Bernard Ponsonby on the evening’s STV News.

What actually happened yesterday was the removal of the threat of blackmail against a Yes vote that had been made against the yards in 2014, and endlessly exploited by the No campaign. The UK government stalled desperately to keep the orders as a bargaining chip in the indyref, not anticipating the prospect of a second one.

But they can’t be delayed forever, and once the orders are in place any possibility of cancelling them is effectively at an end, for a whole slew of mainly extremely obvious reasons. After Fallon had scurried away from him in fear, Ponsonby revealed what the Secretary of State had tried to avoid admitting:

“BAE confirmed to STV News that there is nothing in the contract that would prevent work continuing on the Clyde in the event of a Yes vote in another referendum.”

But Fallon’s toe-curling evasiveness, which finally saw him reduced to hiding behind the skirts of a sour-faced PR woman, had already made that fact clearer than any straight answer could ever have done.