Wings Over Scotland

We’ve just been out for our evening constitutional in the relatively cool night air (Bath sweltered at an oppressive 30C today and Bear Patrol was pretty gruelling), and we thought readers might be interested in what we saw.

The city has observed lockdown with great diligence, as we’ve previously documented, and to be honest we’re not sufficiently familiar with the latest rules to say it wasn’t still doing so tonight. But a nearby park, around 9.30pm, was a disconcerting scene.

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The ramifications for Scottish politics of the failed stitch-up of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse have hardly begun to be felt. The Parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which formally began yesterday and is due to start interviewing people in August, looks set to be swamped in material – or at least, whatever material hasn’t been quietly and conveniently disposed of already – and nobody knows how long it’ll take to reach any sort of conclusion.

It seems a safe bet that the SNP leadership will be praying it doesn’t do so before the 2021 Holyrood election, for all sorts of reasons – not least that it appears beyond any credible doubt that Nicola Sturgeon lied to Parliament about the investigation.

But while Salmond was found innocent on every charge, he continues to be attacked from behind a shield of anonymity by the accusers that the mainly-female jury declined to believe, supported and co-ordinated by organisations funded almost entirely by the Scottish Government and with very close personal links to it.

So when we were putting out our latest Panelbase poll, we thought we’d find out what the people of Scotland thought about it.

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On the face of it, this finding from our latest Panelbase poll isn’t very surprising:

But then again, maybe it is.

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So, the good news today is that independence polling is finally back to where it was almost exactly four years ago – 26 June 2016, to be precise. Although we couldn’t help notice that The National’s front-page splash on the latest (re)surge was taking second billing in its readership stats to a day-old story about the First Minister’s haircut.

Now, as we noted earlier this month, that might just be down to people getting weary of false dawns. But it might also indicate that a measure of realism is belatedly beginning to dawn on the Yes movement about the lack of connection between nice poll numbers and actually securing another referendum.

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We had a little mini-poll out with Panelbase this week, readers. Given that the SNP are currently still insisting that they need ANOTHER mandate at the ballot box to secure a second independence referendum (by our count that would be the tenth), we thought we’d see how many people believed this cunning plan would work.

The results, we suspect, will not amaze you.

Scottish voters, it turns out, aren’t completely stupid.

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BBC Scotland, then and now.

We’re pretty sure they used the same “separating rival groups” phrasing at Tianenmen Square too, but we’d have to go and check. Meanwhile, here’s what really happened.

My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of under £200 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).

But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.

It’s basically become magic.

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We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:

The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.

I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet, here we are.

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