Wings Over Scotland

We’re going to take our own advice, chill out for a few days and enjoy the show as the No Surrender Tories desperately try to Frankenstein some sort of hilarious government together. There’s nothing much anyone can do to advance the cause of independence right now, there’s no urgent crisis in need of addressing, everybody’s pretty frazzled and crotchety, and a wee bit of downtime is probably the best thing for everyone.

It seems a better plan, at any rate, than running around panicking, screaming that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! or that nothing must be done ever again, that we must either declare UDI or give up on what many of us have believed in our whole lives and settle meekly for 2017’s feeble equivalent of The Vow – a shoddy, snivelling “soft Brexit” that’s not going to happen and would be awful even if it did.

Independence will still be here next week, folks. It’s not going anyplace. Obviously if anything dramatic should happen we’ll be on it, but otherwise we’ve got some movies and books and games and stuff to catch up on, and we recommend that you all do the same. Recharge your batteries. Smell the flowers. It’s been a long five years, frankly.

Simon Pia, former Scottish Labour spin doctor.

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This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:

On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.

In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.

(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)

Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.

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There was a minor kerfuffle on the STV leaders debate tonight.

The revelation that Kezia Dugdale may once have changed her mind about a second referendum on independence won’t have come as a particularly great shock to Wings readers, who just a week ago read a detailed account of the party’s countless U-turns and contradictions on the issue.

And what was notable was that Dugdale didn’t deny it. To anyone’s face, at least.

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…which we felt it important to preserve for posterity lest anything happen to it. We’d charitably blame it all on the Telegraph, who made it, were it not for the fact that the Scottish Conservatives have posted it on their own Facebook page.

It’d be awfully embarrassing if they had a poorer-than-expected election result, eh?

Hilary and Carey, South Lanark.

Just a day and a bit left to help get more videos like this made. Do if you can.

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This is how today’s BBC News summed up (fairly accurately) the two main themes of last night’s Question Time special with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn:

May managed to largely get away with her party’s abysmal track record of brutal cuts and austerity, while Corbyn was made very uncomfortable by a howling mob of angry, terrifyingly bloodthirsty old white men over Labour’s policy on Trident.

And while Corbyn’s position on the nuclear deterrent is idiotic and makes him an easy target for opponents, the main reason for the differing outcomes is language.

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…that will satisfy the Unionist parties. Last night Ruth Davidson told STV viewers that even getting more than 50% of the vote in a general election wouldn’t give the SNP a mandate to pursue their manifesto policies.

She was echoing the words of Kezia Dugdale just over a year ago:

So that’s clear. Davidson has reversed her previous view. There is now no peaceful democratic avenue by which the people of Scotland could express the wish for a second referendum which the two main Unionist parties would accept. They have EXPLICITLY said, in full public view, that they would reject any democratic mandate.

And that’s frightening.

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“It couldn’t be clearer than that” was Kezia Dugdale’s assertion tonight on the subject of whether a Labour UK government would block a second independence referendum, during her “Ask The Leader” interview with the BBC’s Glenn Campbell.

She’d insisted explicitly several times that a Jeremy Corbyn administration WOULD block a new indyref, even after being shown a video clip of Corbyn from earlier in the day saying he wouldn’t, and she repeatedly urged readers not to listen to the party’s leader and to instead go and look at the Labour manifesto.

So we did.

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From the Victoria Derbyshire show today in Dunstable.

“This election is life or death for us.”

The Oxford University research she’s talking about, and the Napier and Heriot-Watt Universities research into the mental health impact of Work Capability Assessments.

No.13: James, Aberdeenshire.

Please help make more of these brilliant films.

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Politics is still on hiatus after the dreadful events of Manchester, so we’ve taken the chance to go and enjoy the sudden summer weather while nothing was happening.

And today, as we (“Drove at a legal speed” – Ed) across the pretty hills overlooking Bath in an inexpensive convertible, a song came on the stereo that made us think of all the Unionist trolls who were still busily raging on Twitter – mainly about the SNP’s awful failure to light up every building in Scotland with the Union Jack in tribute to the dead (no, really), but also at the most recent data “proving” that independence would mean the country regressing to the Stone Age and whatnot.

So we thought we’d share it with you, because as well as having a jaunty tune it’s got a good attitude to adopt when they’re screaming and yelling themselves red, white and blue in the face about something or other, rather than wasting your time and mental equilibrium on being dragged into their fetid mind-swamp.

It works on any day, even if you’re not in a sports car.