Wings Over Scotland

The National carried a strange article yesterday, apropos of seemingly nothing, about a Brussels-based political thinktank supposedly linked to the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The piece actually originated on superwoke “fact-checking” site The Ferret a couple of days earlier, and professed to expose how the thinktank was “stoking Scotland’s culture war”.

Alert readers will already have pricked up their ears at this point, because “culture war” is a radical-left dogwhistle term used to obscure, belittle and dismiss groups (largely though not exclusively comprising left-wing feminists) fighting for the safeguarding of children and the protection of women’s and LGB rights.

And sure enough, nothing’s different this time.

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As more horrific experiences from survivors of rape torture gangs surface from across the UK, we must focus not on knee-jerk political posturing but on the root cause that led to the failure of these children by our society.

Political inaction has now opened the door to inevitable political mileage, nurtured from stoking vengeance in a rightly-angered public. Those only interested in creating cultural conflicts no more support justice for survivors than those who allowed this abomination to fester by looking away or worse, covering up the problem.

For any functioning society, inflicting unimaginable pain on children on an alarming scale seems unimaginable. Yet, the evidence has been in front of us for years – so why has immediate action to ensure the safeguarding of children – and vulnerable adults – not been a pressing priority?

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Any rational assessment of Scottish (or indeed UK or world) politics at the moment tends to be negative and depressing, so since it’s a new year we thought we’d make an extra-special effort at writing something positive.

Unfortunately that does require us to enter the realm of fantasy. But hey, everybody needs a little holiday from time to time, right?

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Nobody really answered the question in this article from a few days ago. A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government.

That scenario depends on all sorts of dubious propositions, but in any event what none of them have addressed is what that would change even if it did happen, given that Holyrood has a pro-indy majority RIGHT NOW (and has done so on every single day since the indyref more than a decade ago) and it’s produced nothing whatsoever in terms of movement towards independence by any possible measure.

And it occurred to us that we had genuinely no idea what the SNP’s current official indy strategy is, because the party’s been in such farcical chaos and turmoil ever since Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden resignation. So we thought we should go and check.

To be honest, we’re not much the wiser for having read it.

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Look, we know that mocking front pages on The National is low-hanging fruit, and this particular example could hardly be any more of a self-parody if it tried.

But just for the sheer mental exercise in that stone-dead last week of December when nobody even knows what day it is, let’s imagine if it came true.

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The Scottish Government just issued another response in the long-running Freedom Of Information battle with alert Wings reader Benjamin Harrop over its conspiracy to frame and imprison the late Alex Salmond on false charges. Here’s a genuine extract.

Yeah, definitely nothing to hide here.

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Since it was founded back in November 2011, Wings Over Scotland has been solely financed by its readers. The site has never carried any advertising, we have no secret corporate backers, everything we do is funded by transparent voluntary donations and subscriptions, mostly of a few pounds a month.

We have the freedom to write what we believe, thanks to you, our readers. And since those earliest days, opponents have tried to end that freedom by blocking our funding.

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6 November 2024 was a normal sitting day in the Scottish Parliament, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Nicola Sturgeon spent the previous evening in London, watching a special screening of a dreadful BBC Three sitcom about – of course – drag queens.

But remarkably, though she must have been puffy-eyed and weary, the 6th was one of the few days when she did actually manage to turn up at Holyrood to do her job.

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