Wings Over Scotland

These are the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe-left grouping in the USA with around 60,000 members (or roughly 10 times as many as the Scottish Greens, though per capita closer to the SSP or RISE), at their conference a couple of days ago.

It’s our most fervent wish that one day the left will grasp the fact that this isn’t how you win a war.

It’s also our most abiding fear that this – with its stern admonitions against clapping, or banner-waving, or speaking to anyone who might disagree with you, or taking “fun shortcuts” or wearing “aggressive scents”, in case any of those things cause trauma to the sensitive – might as well be the SNP conference of 2022.

Let’s not blow independence in this Parliament, eh folks?

We’ve just received the verdict in the hearing over costs in our court case against Kezia Dugdale, and it’s an incomprehensible one. The sheriff has awarded costs in full to Dugdale, plus a 50% “uplift” mainly on the grounds of the “complexity” of the case, despite Dugdale having employed the services of perhaps Scotland’s highest-paid specialist defamation QC.

Full costs were awarded despite the sheriff having found that the core complaint on which the case was brought – namely that Dugdale had unjustly defamed me with a damaging and wholly false claim that I was a homophobe – was in fact wholly upheld, and that I had indeed been so defamed.

No explanation was given with regard to the supposed complexities from which the uplift arose. The case was in fact a quite straightforward one in defamation terms: an allegation was made, no supporting facts were provided for it and it was found to be entirely false, but the defender was excused liability on the grounds of honest belief – despite being unable to provide the sheriff with any rational basis for that belief.

That’s just about the bare minimum of complexity that could ever possibly exist in a defamation case, and readers might understandably feel that it ought to have been well within the normal skill set of the defender’s representatives, particularly given that the document comprising the entire core of the case was a single tweet of less than 140 characters.

Apparently if you’re a lawyer who’s been paid tens of thousands of pounds to debate a single tweet you also deserve a 50% bonus by way of extra compensation for all the stress and trauma of, um, doing your normal job.

Kezia Dugdale at no point before, during or after the case apologised for or withdrew her remarks – indeed, after our initial complaint she repeated and expanded them, leaving us with no remedy but to pursue the matter in court, and to compete as best we could with the astronomical sums spent on Dugdale’s defence by external parties and approved by the court even though the sum being sued for was relatively modest.

We don’t yet have a final bill, but we expect it to be in the rough vicinity of £100,000 as previously advised. We’ve already polled readers on their desired response in that event, and received an overwhelming majority of 9:1 in favour of filing an appeal against the substantive judgement on the case.

(The verdict on expenses cannot in practice be appealed itself, but were a substantive appeal to be successful the expenses verdict would automatically be overturned.)

We intend to carry out that decision, but any further views are welcomed.

You’re going to need to before you watch today’s episode of The Jeremy Vine Show, featuring Paul Burrell (who used to be a royal butler about 20 years ago and somehow is now a political commentator), Nicola McLean (who used to get her surgically-altered breasts out for tabloid newspapers around the same time and then went on a reality show for halfwits with no actual talents), and Carole Malone, who we assume is some sort of live public-safety-information warning about the dangers of overdoing HRT.

Vine watches the unfolding horror with the expression of a man absolutely convinced he’s going to be murdered the next time he comes to Scotland. The most painful part is probably just after (Scottish) co-host and former weathergirl Storm Huntley (no, really) helpfully pipes up to suggest “shortbread, tartan… bagpipes” as Scotland’s economic foundations, at which point Jeremy turns in last-ditch desperation to the audience to save him from this slow-motion trainwreck and… well, you’ll see how that goes.

When the second indyref comes along, whenever the Yes campaign has a political broadcast slot on TV, we suggest just putting this on every time.

The modern world is an ideological minefield, readers, and is increasingly almost as dangerous as a real one. Having the wrong opinions about things can easily get you fired, ostracised from polite society, arrested or beaten up, and nowhere is this more the case than in the sphere of gender politics.

The extremely brave intersex woman Claire Graham (aka @MRKHvoice on Twitter, her latest account after a series of arbitrary bannings for upsetting the wrong people with statements of biological fact) recently compiled a list of things which are now deemed “transphobic” by trans activists, and given the transience and vulnerability of anything published on Twitter, we thought it was a good idea to preserve it here, with some additions of our own and from others.

We’ve previously noted how alarmingly this sort of extremist, intolerant and openly violent male bullying in the guise of progressive political correctness has been used in recent months to silence all sorts of people (mainly but not exclusively feminists).

Politicians, police and numerous other authorities in both Scotland and the UK have been complicit – whether intentionally or not – in enabling a terrifying “woke” culture of censorship and intimidation in which the wishes of the vast majority of the public are about to be simply ridden roughshod over, resulting in the creation of laws which could have (and are already having) absolutely horrific consequences.

Anyone raising issues, however, is liable to find themselves at the centre of a vicious storm of outrage, abuse or worse. So if you’re concerned about the imminent abolition of sex but want to stay out of trouble, here’s the stuff you need to avoid.

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We watched the whole of the Labour shadow Scottish Secretary’s interview on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland, and can confirm that this is a wholly accurate representation of what she said on it with regard to Labour’s position on Brexit.

So for those of you keeping score: Labour does NOT support a second referendum, does NOT support the current deal, does NOT support no deal, but WOULD vote for the current deal if it included a second referendum, and would INSIST on a second referendum on any alternative deal.

Honestly, we have no idea why anyone’s still confused.

Good luck making sense of this one, folks.

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Because it looks like you’re going to need them.

If the Scottish Government can’t pass a budget it’ll fall, and with no majority for any alternative administration that’ll leave no option but to hold a general election.

Meanwhile, at Westminster, the UK government is running out of time to get a Brexit deal through Parliament, and facing all kinds of procedural shenanigans which may very well lead to a UK general election.

Should that happen, the UK will likely ask the EU for an extension to Article 50, which would take us past the European elections in May, which would mean that the UK would have to take part in those elections  too (because you can’t have a country that’s still an EU member state having no representation in the European Parliament).

Scottish or UK general elections could lead to a new independence referendum, a new Brexit referendum, or both, sending Scots to the polling stations up to FIVE times (and the rest of the UK up to four) in a matter of months, with all the attendant campaigning, colossal expense, economic uncertainty and governmental standstill that such insanity would bring about.

Good luck, everyone.

It’s fair to say, readers, that Wings Over Scotland is somewhat cynical about the UK and Scottish media. It’s pretty much our thing. Very little about it behaving maliciously, untruthfully or incompetently genuinely shocks us. But today is one of those rare days.

Votes of no confidence in a UK government are even more uncommon. The last one was almost 40 years ago. They’re extremely dramatic and newsworthy events. So it’s a little odd that one has been called this afternoon and the British state broadcaster has absolutely nothing to say about it, even on its politics website.

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This is the 5,000th post since Wings Over Scotland began in November 2011, which is just shy of two a day, every single day, since then. We wanted such a landmark post to be something serious and significant, but in light of the utter brain-melting futility of trying to write anything sensible about politics in the UK today that won’t be overtaken by ridiculous events within seven minutes, screw it, we’re going to this instead.

So we’ll see you all later this evening for the result of Theresa May’s confidence vote. What’s the worst that could happen?

No, really, we’re asking.

Brexit isn’t really this site’s remit, which is why we’ve been relatively quiet in recent weeks as the UK’s shambolic exit from the EU hogs all the news and Scottish politics has been relegated to a largely-dormant backwater in the press.

Yes supporters don’t speak with one voice on the EU, and while we’re in favour of it we’ve long said that the indy movement can’t really move on until the fog clears and we know for sure what Brexit’s going to look like. Deciding whether to be part of the EU should be a decision for an independent Scotland to make, not a precondition.

But dear lord, this is such a mess it needs to be examined.

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Only an idiot would try to write anything today about the epic mess currently unfolding in British politics. You’d barely get to the end of typing a sentence before events had rendered it obsolete. But there’s one thing we’d really like to know, which bewilderingly nobody is mentioning.

The primary root cause of Brexit was idiots complaining about immigration. The core supposed aim of leaving, no matter what anyone said, was to reduce the number of foreign people coming to live and work in the UK. The issue of immigration regularly topped polls of what voters were most concerned about, and a 2017 study showed it was the biggest factor in the Leave vote.

But yesterday the UK government, after two and a half years of quite spectacularly inept negotiation, produced for the approval of the electorate a Brexit deal which did precisely NOTHING about immigration, and nobody in the media even mentioned it.

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Wings Over Scotland is seven years old today (the period of time defined by the Good Friday Agreement as a “generation” in terms of referendums), and it doesn’t feel like a day over 25. Can we hurry up and have another indy vote before the entire country burns to the ground around our ears, please?

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