Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish political focus has been on Holyrood in recent days, with the Programme For Government announced and Westminster returning from recess. But parliaments can only do so much. Extra-parliamentary action is required for many reasons, not least because activists are increasingly frustrated at delays and uncertainty.

Giving direction and something constructive to do is therefore important; and that will have to come from within the grassroots movement.

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Bad news, readers. We’ve done some research, and it’s our grave duty to report to you that according to the evidence we’ve discovered, there’s a high statistical probability that everyone reading this website will one day die.

Luckily there’s a solution: we can all just commit suicide right now.

Wait – that’s a stupid idea, right?

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Let’s be clear about something straight away – we’re NOT about to write an article in defence of Tony Abbott. He IS a sexist, a misogynist and a climate change denier (and a homophobe), and as far as we can ascertain he’s NOT actually all that good at trade either. So even though the bar for improving the competence of the UK government is astonishingly low, we don’t want him in it any more than anyone else does.

But this is still an incredibly brainless thing to say:

And it explains a lot about what’s gone wrong everywhere.

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Throughout the summer, the Scottish Government has been talking consistently about its goal being the “total elimination” of the coronavirus, and specifically contrasting that with England’s approach of merely “suppressing” it.

In the “framework for decision making” published in late April, the administration stated bluntly that “There is no such thing as a level of “acceptable loss”“ from the virus. But then yesterday something changed.

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Oh, is it that time again? Gosh, it seems to come round quicker every year.

So forgive us if we feel like we’ve heard this song already.

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Well, imagine our surprise.

If only we’d been telling you for the last two years, eh?

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We suppose we should be happy to learn that Scottish Government ministers are at least still sometimes capable of understanding that men and women are different and there are times when it’s inappropriate for men to be in women’s spaces.

We just wish they didn’t keep reminding us of something so much.

We really hope the 27% of Scots who already think the Sun revolves around the Earth isn’t getting bigger.

During the 2014 indyref, the astonishingly vast imbalance of the mainstream Scottish media was partly compensated by a huge rise in new media, with dozens and dozens of sites filling the gaping chasms where printed and broadcast media would have been in any country with a press worthy of the name at such an exciting time.

The subsequent shrivelling of that presence has been one of the least observed and explored phenomena of the six years since the referendum, and especially since the SNP’s election victory in 2016. The incredibly wide-ranging, mutually-supportive pro-Yes new media is now down to a tiny handful of outlets, most of which are barely read (and most of which would celebrate if the others burned down in a chemical fire).

There are many and varied reasons for this worrying situation, but before we get into those let’s have a quick look at who’s still who and what’s still what.

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Last week, in the biggest city in Scotland, a young mother was found dead next to her starving infant child, because Scotland’s economic, immigration and welfare policies are decided hundreds of miles away in a foreign country by a party that Scots haven’t voted for in 65 years but which has ruled Scotland for 42 of those years anyway.

There’s other stuff about GERS too, but that seems the important bit.

The Sunday Times carries a quite surprising story today. (And that’s not just because the person in the picture isn’t actually Liz Lloyd at all.)

We’ll pause for but a brief moment to contemplate the assertion that this unelected, unaccountable civil servant might be “the second most powerful woman in the Scottish government” and then move on to the interesting bit.

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