Wings Over Scotland

Prospective new Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson was interviewed on Sky News this morning, where she made the usual honking mess of the admittedly-impossible task that is trying to justify her party’s naked hypocrisy over second referendums.

Swinson indignantly insisted that “the SNP do not have a mandate for [a second indyref]”, a statement which we of course already know is unambiguously false.

The SNP campaigned in 2016 on an explicit pledge to have a new vote if Scotland was dragged out of the EU despite voting to Remain, and they won the election and formed the government, having secured more MSPs than Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems put together (63-60).

They then put their manifesto pledge to the Parliament, which voted for it by a clear majority of 54% to 46% (almost exactly the reverse of the 2014 referendum, routinely described by Unionists as an “overwhelming” majority).

Finally they campaigned on the same pledge in the 2017 UK general election, where they again won more seats than the three Unionist parties combined (35-24).

So that’s a pretty clear triple democratic and political mandate in any parliamentary democracy: a majority of MSPs, a majority of Scottish MPs and a majority of the Scottish Parliament. But since Jo Swinson doesn’t seem to recognise it, we wondered if she maybe just didn’t know what the word meant.

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That’s the only reasonable interpretation of this tweet from Jenny Marra MSP.

Because clearly if the Scottish Parliament of 1707 was an illegitimate oligarchy that didn’t represent the people – and it certainly didn’t – then it can’t have had any right to sign away the sovereignty of Scotland and the Acts Of Union must immediately be repealed and a new referendum held to decide whether Scotland should join the UK.

And of course, we already know how that would go.

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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.

After five days I’ve had no response to this:

As Ofcom require any complaints about the BBC to be directed to the Corporation first, I’ve sent the BBC the letter below today (by physical mail, as the online complaint form is comically inadequate), which I expect to be a waste of time and energy. If I don’t receive a satisfactory response – and I’m sure that I won’t – I’ll take it up with Ofcom.

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Right then. Our 2019 crowdfunder is officially over (the page is actually still live at the moment because several readers have asked it be kept open until the weekend so they can make their own donations, but it’ll be finally closed down on Sunday night).

And good heavens.

The main page alone narrowly beat last year’s all-sources total (ie including donations made via other routes like direct bank transfers) by nearly £600, and the actual final figure for 2019 [EDIT: updated 24 June] is, jawdroppingly, this much:

£171,849

Blimey.

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My interview on this week’s Alex Salmond show:

Click the pic to watch.

A crude clip of this segment from Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC show yesterday is doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment, and it deserves both better audiovisual quality and a wider audience. If features Regan Morann, a rather confused Tory from Scotland who has quite an opinion of himself.

But for some reason, that swaggering self-confidence deserted him when confronted with the reality that Tories in the rest of the UK would throw Scotland (and Northern Ireland) under the bus in the blink of an eye if doing so was the price of Brexit.

An incredulous Fogarty, speaking for just about everyone listening to the show, asks “Where’s your self-respect?” as Morann burbles about debasing himself desperately in front of his English colleagues who don’t want him or care about him, and his eventual answer was enlightening, in a tragic kind of way.

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The UK’s political commentariat is afire with shock today over a new poll.

The poll showed that Tory members would by margins of around 2:1 willingly sacrifice Scotland and Northern Ireland – along with the UK economy and their own party – to make sure Brexit happened. Which is all very interesting, unless you read Wings in which case you knew it a year ago.

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The Times, 30 June 1998.

Wait, Michael who? Well, this should be good.

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You could actually weep for some of the people in our country.

But the point Yes supporters understand and Unionists don’t is that it’s everything to do with the question – because “who is or might be Prime Minister, or which party is in government” is never our choice. It’s the choice of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland together. One of those countries outnumbers the others by 8 to 1.

More than that, it isn’t just who is Prime Minister now, or who may be in the future – it’s every single Prime Minister in my 35 years of existence on this planet.

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Our 2019 crowdfunder now has just 24 hours to go, and to be honest it’s exceeded our wildest expectations. Despite the moribund state of Scottish politics over the last two years we’re currently around £3200 beyond the previous all-time record, and that’s just phenomenal. You never stop taking our breath away, folks.

But we’re going to rattle the tin one last time by repeating something we said last year.

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