Wings Over Scotland

Ruth Davidson finally emerged today from a summer of hiding from press stories about her racist and sectarian councillors and MSPs to give a bizarre, nervy and gabbling interview to Good Morning Scotland.

Highlights included calling Show Racism The Red Card an “anti-Semitic” organisation and proposing the building of eight entire new towns in Scotland (the funding source and potential locations for this colossal undertaking were not specified), all filled with social housing which would nevertheless be for sale under Right To Buy.

(Which if it could somehow magically be done would of course lead to the homes being quickly sold at heavy discounts, leaving councils insufficient money to fund their replacements and creating another massive housing bubble and crisis.)

But our very favourite bit was when (at 2h 17m) she said this:

“Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say to a bloke in the pub who’s half-cut with a broken glass, six foot tall and five foot wide.”

To be honest, readers, if we encountered a 30-sq-foot drunk waving a broken glass around in a pub, we’d just be looking for the door as fast as possible. But clearly Ruth Davidson frequents different sorts of bars to us.

So just for a bit of light-hearted Friday fun, we thought we’d ask: what WOULD you say to that person in that situation?

Last year:

That’ll definitely have been done, then, right?

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When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.

Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.

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What Tories are, in two images from one week.

Never forget it until the day you die, readers.

This is Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:

But with the greatest respect to Scotland’s pioneering engineers, they’re not the thing we’re reminded of when we hear Scottish Labour talking about the new bridge. This is what we’re reminded of.

The Sunday Times has a breathless account today of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant five-day tour of Scotland.

It sounds like quite the event.

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This site is still hampered by the consequences of TotallyUnbelievableMadnessGate, so until normal service is resumed here’s a quick recap of a few stories from the last few days you may have missed.

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This morning sees the release of another set of GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) figures accompanied, no doubt, by the usual strange hybrid of sneering and cringing from Unionist politicians braying proudly that we’re too small, too subsidised and too stupid to ever look after our own country.

So as the annual circus act gets under way again, for a little perspective we took a quick look at Scotland’s actual standing in the international community.

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We’ll only be making a very brief comment on the story in Tuesday’s Herald, for hopefully obvious reasons. The piece by Tom Gordon has been written for maximum innuendo to allow the wildest speculations on social media – which are of course duly taking place – but the alleged events relate entirely to some tweets from our Twitter account, none of which have been deleted and all of which are still publicly visible.

Nothing more sinister or serious than some tweets has occurred, or been alleged to have occurred. None of the tweets involved are in ANY way threatening, not even in a joking sense. That’s all we’ll be saying on the subject at this time.

With this year’s GERS figures imminent, there are two stories about North Sea oil in today’s papers which are markedly different in both tone and honesty.

This, for example, is the front page of the Sunday Herald:

It’s basically a reprise of a Wings story from almost a year ago, noting that despite producing broadly similar amounts of oil to Scotland from the North Sea, Norway has generated tens of billions in pounds in government revenue from it – even during the price slump of recent years – while Scotland has actually LOST money.

The Sunday Times, though, has a rather different take.

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