I know he’s a figure of comedy and pity, but this is something else.
Someone glue the cork in the bottle, eh? For his own good.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
This is Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, quoted in the Independent On Sunday on the 15th of November, just two and a half weeks ago.
That’s interesting, isn’t it?
Tonight we watched as the conclusion of a “debate” in the UK Parliament saw the “opposition”, almost unprecedentedly, sum up the same case as the government, to roof-raising cheers and applause (which is now apparently permitted again) from the Conservative benches for a Labour shadow minister.
We were rather put in mind of a famous Neil Kinnock speech from 1985.
Alex Salmond in the Syria debate with the non-pacifist case against bombing.
(Features brief cameo appearance from Alberto Costa MP, noted twat.)
It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.
(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)
So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.
It turned out that we were wrong.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
Ah, the good old days.
Obviously, actually including the exact phrases “within 45 minutes” and “weapons of mass destruction” might have been a little bit too near the knuckle, but the message comes across just the same: “Here we go again.”
We don’t often bring you footage of an Armed Forces Committee session in the US Senate, readers, but this spellbinding six minutes of questioning from a Republican senator on the subject of military action against ISIS doesn’t miss and hit the wall.
(We should note that Sen. Graham is a hawk who wants ISIS bombed back to the Stone Age. But even he can see the insane, irrational nature of the action currently being proposed, which would leave Syria a shattered mess but firmly in the hands of a murderous Russian-backed dictator conducting a ruinous, destabilising civil war.)
This is John Humphreys on the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier this week:
And there’s only one small thing wrong with that.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.
Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.
So we thought we’d see if it was true.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
