Wings Over Scotland

Today’s Daily Record runs with a bizarre story lifted from yesterday’s Guardian, which resurrected the media’s longstanding but latterly-dormant hate campaign against the Scottish Government’s popular “baby box” initiative.

Universal free baby boxes have been used in Finland for the past 69 years with no negative consequences, and have indeed coincided with an absolutely enormous reduction in child mortality there. They’re being increasingly adopted all over the world, and are also sold commercially in the UK for up to £450.

Uniquely, however, in Scotland they’re bad.

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Sane people across the nation have watched in growing disbelief for the last two years as the UK government’s catastroshambles over Brexit has unfolded. In the latest jaw-dropping developments, David Davis has revealed that he’s only just now thinking of STARTING negotiating a trade deal with the EU – 22 months after the referendum and with absolutely no idea of how to solve the Irish Question on which it all depends.

Meanwhile, Faisal Islam of Sky News has made the pertinent point that the one “land-based” border between the UK and mainland Europe, the Channel Tunnel, has no infrastructure in place for serving as a checkpoint because it was fundamentally never designed or envisaged for a Europe without the UK, and the UK government has done absolutely nothing in the last two years to prepare for that changing.

And the more ludicrously chaotically and ineptly the whole farce plays out, the more it’s only possible to come to one rational conclusion about it: that the Prime Minister’s grand plan for enacting Brexit is to fail.

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We apologise if any readers were inadvertently given a misleading impression by any of these headlines, stories or claims.

The correct version of the report is below.

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So everyone’s fighting about Gaelic again. Provoked by a minor story about a Gaelic dictionary MSM and alt-media pundits are flying at each other with daggers over a language spoken by almost nobody on Earth and on which the government spends a few measly and irrelevant pennies, trying to turn it into a proxy war over politics and the constitution and fascism and genocide and goodness knows what else.

We’ve covered the political nonsense around the issue numerous times on this site, and we’re not about to do so again here. This, as befits the Soapbox section, is a purely personal view, which will doubtless attract more furious shrieking from the sort of people who long ago lost the ability to listen to a counterpoint – or indeed tolerate the mere concept of one – let alone consider it or debate it without abuse.

But hey ho. After a while you just learn to tune that stuff out, so let’s go.

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Holiday Boy is taking slacking to a new extreme to mark the onset of spring, and we’re sad to inform you that there’ll be no Cairnstoons on Wings for another couple of weeks while our intermittent satirist rearranges his Fabergé eggs or something.

Entirely by coincidence, yesterday we were doing some overdue admin, and as we filed away some previous bits of crayon-work we couldn’t help but be struck by the prescience of a few cartoons from various times, 2013 in particular.

So just in case anyone had forgotten (attention spans are short these days), here’s some of the insight we’re all currently missing.

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We weren’t going to do anything on yesterday’s disturbing development in the legal wrangle between the Scottish and UK governments over devolved powers and Brexit, because the rest of the media has been covering it at length and we don’t have any particular expertise or insight to offer.

But it was hard to ignore the striking turn of phrase used, not by some sensationalist partisan commentator but by the learned and sober QC Jonathan Mitchell, last seen acting for the petitioners in the Alistair Carmichael lie case.

It doesn’t pull any punches, but as a summary of the relationship London wants to put in place between itself and the devolved nations for years to come (Labour-run Wales has already caved), and which Unionist politicians and the more witless pundits are of course portraying as unreasonable grievance-mongering and failure on the part of the Scottish Government, it’s about as accurate a description as you’re ever going to find.

Alert readers may recall that the Electoral Commission recently chose, to everyone’s (cough) great surprise, to take no action against extremist Unionist shout-monkeys Scotland In Union over a number of clear breaches of electoral rules, or for failing to disclose a number of large donations from extremely wealthy donors.

10 days ago the EC published a tranche of FOI documents relating to the case on its website, with the donor details redacted to protect the identity of the various Lords, Dukes, Earls and Countesses who’d rather you didn’t know that they’d been handing thousands of pounds at a time to SiU.

Or at least, sort of redacted.

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*27

So, yeah. It was on this day in 1991 that the first ever proper issue of Amiga Power (A Magazine With Tatty Shoes, or something) hit Britons’ newsagents’ shelves.

>>SUB: PLEASE CHECK IMAGE

And while vast numbers of old games magazines are now available to read as lovely friendly PDFs or similar that you can load up onto your computer or electro-tablet and flick through page by page in a gratifying manner, AP inexplicably isn’t.

Or is it? Or IS it? OR IS IT?

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As alert readers will recall, nowadays we only look at the Scottish Daily Express if we’re absolutely desperate for material, so this piece slipped past us a few days ago:

And since the only thing in the papers today is page after page of unbearable fawning drivel about the stupendously insignificant (fifth in line to the throne, will never ever be king unless a terrorist blows up Buckingham Palace with an atomic bomb, is roughly as important to the wellbeing of the nation as Hamilton Accies’ third-choice goalkeeper) royal baby, we figured we may as well have a look at it now.

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A beginner’s guide to how it works:

SUNDAY: The Sunday Times copies an SNP BAD nonsense story wholesale from the previous day’s Scottish Daily Mail.

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Even in a sluggish news season, it’s somehow extra-dispiriting to see a once-august newspaper like the Sunday Times fill its pages by trying to flog its readers reheated old cobblers from the previous day’s Daily Mail.

We’ve already shredded the towering stupidity of the story itself (the Times dutifully repeats all the exact same drivel about meal deals and loyalty vouchers), so we were pleased when social media presented a new angle on it.

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Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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