Wings Over Scotland

The BBC’s Scottish politics website today prominently carries this story:

Our famously alert readers may recall as far back as five-and-a-half months ago, which was the last time the Scottish media tried to whip up demented scare stories about baby boxes, which have been given to every new mother in Finland for approximately 70 years and caused absolutely no documented problems.

So what’s fresh about the story to justify this significant new coverage? Let’s see.

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Tory MP Kirstene “dumber than a box of” Hair is best known for being the member of the UK Parliament who didn’t vote in the Brexit referendum because it was too difficult.

But today she’s made a tilt at a different title.

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The Scottish Daily Mail today has a big headline relaying the seemingly-unambiguous bad news that unemployment in Scotland has apparently risen by 11,000.

But cheer up, folks, because better times are ahead.

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We’re pretty sure it was “Listen to you about being ‘better together’, so that they ended up with a Tory government they didn’t vote for but which was imposed on them by the people in a much larger country, and which has a long track record of imposing brutal, callous welfare policies on the poor for largely ideological reasons, and which has entirely predictably continued to do so”.

It’s not rocket science, hen.

(We apologise for the late arrival of this week’s toon, due to MI5 on the line, probably.)

We’re blacklisted by the press regulator IPSO, but fortunately when we raise issues with especially blatant inaccuracies in UK newspapers alert readers sometimes take up the cudgel and file complaints with them because we can’t.

One such case was when the Daily Express published a story this summer with the eye-rubbing and creatively-capitalised headline “MAJORITY of Scots BACK BREXIT as SNP support PLUMMETS from voters backing Ruth Davidson”.

And, y’know, that’s not a very true thing to say.

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When indoor-hat-wearing uberYoon nutter George Galloway appeared in some of the madder corners of the gutter press this week after appearing on RT to extravagantly belittle last weekend’s indy marchers, we didn’t bother talking about it because who cares what that irrelevant old zoomer thinks, right?

But when an alert reader drew our attention to this spectacular clip of Galloway’s pre-indyref and post-indyref views on the EU we couldn’t let it go, because it so perfectly encapsulates not just what a huge buffoon George Galloway is, but the jaw-dropping, bare-faced, crass hypocrisy of so much Unionist argument.

We’re only sad he’s neither a politician nor in Scotland, or he’d be a shoo-in.

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We knew this would be a fast-moving phenomenon when we created it, but we’re only just beginning to realise the magnitude of the rod we’ve made for our own backs. Because the supply of rock-headed clownshows sucking up taxpayers’ money on the opposition benches at Holyrood appear to be effectively infinite.

There’s only actually one “l” in “intolerable”, but that’s still the intellectual high point of the tweet. It really is hard to adequately convey what a brainless piece of idiocy this is without just swearing for a solid hour, but we’ll try.

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We felt sure that our awarding of the inaugural Thickest Politician In Scotland title this morning would be taken as the throwing down of a gauntlet, and we weren’t wrong. Because within just hours, the Prince Regent had staked his claim to the crown.

Greene – who was rejected by the voters of Cunninghame North by almost 9,000 votes but sits in Parliament anyway – is in fact supposed to serve the people of the West Scotland region as a list MSP, not the whole country, and we’re not aware of any breakdown of how Scotland’s eight list regions voted in 2014 so we have no idea how many voted No in WS. But that’s by far the least idiotic part of the tweet.

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A famous quote commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (and hotly disputed, as always, by point-missing Quote Nazis), runs that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

It’s been bouncing around our heads for the last couple of days, because with the SNP annual conference in full swing in Glasgow, Scottish political pundits have taken it upon themselves to start issuing bizarre assertions/advice about the party’s strategy for securing a second independence referendum.

This version, from the Herald’s cut-price David Torrance knockoff Mark Smith today, is no more than we’d expect from that source:

But we were a lot more surprised to see the notion also being taken up by someone we’d previously credited with a lot more insight and intelligence.

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Alert readers will be aware that while the absolutely mind-numbing empirical stupidity of Scotland’s latest batch of Unionist MPs and MSPs is a recurring theme on Wings, we’ve never attempted to place it on any sort of formal footing. And to be honest, that sort of laziness on our part is no longer sustainable.

Because folks, look at the pure state of this:

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the inaugural Thickest Politician In Scotland.

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