Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour mounted another of their infamous stunt “protests” today, as always dutifully assisted and advertised by the Scottish media.

STV reported it as an event organised by a small rail union – not the RMT or ASLEF, but the little-known Transport Salaried Staff Association – which would feature “other campaigners”, but in fact it was a Scottish Labour shindig from top to bottom, with no union branding visible anywhere and Scottish Labour on all the placards.

Well, we say “all”.

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We’ve got no words for this, so we’ll let it stand by itself.

Because 55% voted No. Welcome to Brexit.

STV News gets the new year off to a cheery start today:

The headline, as alert readers will be accustomed to by now, is a flat-out lie. As far as the article reveals – and there’s nothing on the company’s website offering any more detail, nor in the longer quotes we found elsewhere – chartered accountants French Duncan LLP have in fact made no predictions whatsoever as to the number of Scottish insolvencies in 2019, merely recorded the number that took place in 2018.

STV’s claim that the 2018 figure of 12,000 “could be even higher by the end of 2019” appears, then, to have been entirely invented. But the depressing tone – which the Daily Express turns into a full-blown crisis, roping in Murdo Fraser for some SNP BAD rentaguff along the way – is even more inexplicable than simple fabrication.

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The last two years, particularly 2018, have been a pretty miserable time in the annals of Scottish independence. Not because support has fallen – it hasn’t budged an inch, however much Unionists might try to desperately convince themselves otherwise – but because there hasn’t, in essence, been anything we could usefully do.

Faced with a brick wall of “now is not the time” intransigence from a UK government elected by England and determined to frustrate the democratic will of the Scottish Parliament, we could talk all we wanted but had no means to determine our own fate, locked in the boot of a car speeding towards a cliff edge with a lunatic at the wheel.

That age – and it’s felt like an age – is very nearly at an end.

It’s time to get ready.

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An alert reader spotted this today:

Because with Scottish Labour, lying is for life, not just Christmas.

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There’s a digital edition of the Times out today, but the normal Scotland section doesn’t make the cut. (There’s normally an Ireland section too – although it doesn’t get billed on the Contents list – which is also missing today, and there’s never a Wales section for some reason.)

Maybe if we all keep really quiet they’ll completely forget we’re here and not Brexit us either. Have a good one, readers.

We can think of no better illustrative metaphor for the brain-withering idiot festival that was 2018 than page 16 of today’s Sunday Mail, which in the space of a single inch of newsprint predicts both SNP gains at any new general election, and then SNP losses to the exact same Labour and Tory parties that the editorial on the left excoriates as incompetent, “deluded” and “moribund”.

We wish we could rationally hope 2019 will be any better.

Okay, it’s only the 19th of December, but we don’t think there’s any chance of this one being beaten by the time it’s 2019.

As expected, Labour bottled the chance to call a vote of no confidence in the UK government today, refusing to support a motion tabled by four other opposition parties last night and thereby guaranteeing the Tories at least another two months in power.

Their official stated reason is that the only way to avoid a disastrous hard Brexit is to call a vote of no confidence in the Tories next month when it’ll (somehow, magically) be more likely to succeed, trigger a general election, get (somehow, magically) a Labour majority and then go to the EU and negotiate (somehow, magically) a better deal from them than the Tories have done.

Which makes this a bit of a beamer:

So if it’s “very clear” that there can be “no more negotiations” (and therefore no better deal), and Labour is going to vote against Theresa May’s deal (which Labour says it is), and if Brexit is going to happen (which Labour says it is), then the only possible conclusion left is that Labour’s official policy is now to crash out of the EU with no deal, and absolutely everything the party is saying in public about Brexit is a lie.

So at least everyone now finally knows where they stand. Even if, as is so often the case nowadays, it’s only because Labour told the truth by accident.

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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