Wings Over Scotland

More great news, right?

Except, sadly, it’s completely untrue.

Read the rest of this entry →

Crazy stuff happens when we have a thought.

Buckle in for a bumpy ride if you don’t like pictures of my ugly mug.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scottish Labour’s 2019 conference, which starts in Dundee tomorrow, isn’t taking place in the most auspicious of circumstances, to put it kindly. The branch office is trailing a breathtaking 22 points behind the SNP in the latest Holyrood polling, 8 points behind the Tories, and the gap is getting bigger.

Westminster polling isn’t a great deal better, with the SNP 15 points ahead despite having been in power for 12 years and doggedly attempting to commit electoral suicide with a raft of increasingly unpopular policies (more on that to come).

Donations have shrivelled to under £36,000 in the last year. (For perspective, the 2018 Wings fundraiser made over £153,000.) The North Britain branch has shed a fifth of its membership in a matter of months, has had to give away conference passes for free to try to fill seats, and is embroiled in a bitter spat over its EU policy.

So it’d be a tough time to be Richard Leonard, if anyone knew who that was.

Read the rest of this entry →

We must admit we haven’t been keeping fully up to date with our Thickest Politician In Scotland rankings recently, mainly because they’ve been so deluged with submissions that we can barely scratch the backlog.

This month alone, for example, we’ve seen Murdo Fraser try to blame the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems for his party’s shambolic Brexit fiasco, millionaire Tory landowner Sir Edward Mountain sneering that the SNP’s Ian Blackford is too rich because he has a Range Rover, James Kelly of Labour humiliating himself (again) over the budget and boneheaded Lib Dem barrel-scraping Christine Jardine mocking someone for having an inferior intellect while she failed to even nearly spell the word “supporters”.

And that’s before we even get to the Tory MSP who stood up at this afternoon’s FMQs and suggested that lowering the drink-drive limit had somehow led to an increase in road traffic accidents, presumably in the belief that it would actually be better and safer if everyone bombing up and down Scotland’s motorways had had a few beers first.

But pretenders are one thing. There’s still an undisputed king.

Read the rest of this entry →

For our money – and by an admittely wafer-thin margin over the likes of Annie Wells, Miles Briggs, Alex Cole-Hamilton and James Kelly – Tory list MSP Jamie Greene is still the lowest-watt bulb in the Scottish Parliament’s festival of lights.

(Our alerter readers may have spotted that that’s an official watermarked Scottish Conservatives pic, so that’s them making him look as intelligent as they can.)

But being really properly brainless isn’t just a matter of not knowing which powers are devolved before you attack the Scottish Government for your own UK administration’s failings or not being able to do basic arithmetic.

To stand out as especially doltish in a group of epic dolts like the current Tory cohort in Holyrood, you also need to be incapable of following simple logical trains of thought. So let’s see if we can illustrate with a topical example.

Read the rest of this entry →

As we’re writing this, our YouTube channel remains dead. We’re still trying to navigate through YouTube’s awful maze of robotic guards to reach a human being, and while at least two newspapers – The National and the Scotsman – have asked the BBC for a comment, none has been forthcoming.

The mainstream media’s attacks on this site in the last couple of years have included getting our Twitter account shut down in 2016, getting me arrested, having all of Wings’ electronic equipment confiscated by the police and now killing our YouTube channel full of crucial documentary evidence, most of which isn’t available anywhere else. (On top of an endless catalogue of smear stories and hatchet jobs, of course.)

Now, we’re not planning on going anywhere, but in the face of such a concerted and increasingly sinister assault aimed at silencing us, we also can’t make any guarantees that Wings itself will continue to survive. WordPress may prove as fragile in the face of malice as Twitter and YouTube have.

So in case we fall victim to another unexpected technical/censorship catastrophe, or suddenly commit “suicide”, you might want to strengthen the rest of the team.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the uglier facets of opposition to the hugely-popular but now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act was the 100% uniform stance against it in the Scottish press. Despite the Act being backed by a large majority of voters across every demographic and political divide, not one print or broadcast journalist ever stood up for the public.

The reason, of course, is that bigots (and lurid stories about them) are a large part of what keeps the Scottish media’s life support machine functioning, and so the media panders cynically to the extremist sections of the Celtic and “Rangers” support who still buy papers for the latest transfer gossip and soft-soap interviews with ex-players.

And so it is with a remarkably mad front-page lead in today’s Sunday Herald.

The paper reports that “over half” – 44 out of 86 – outstanding OBFA charges have been “converted” into other types of offences and are still being prosecuted by the independent Crown Office, claiming without explanation that this is “an embarrassing move for the SNP Government”.

But it rather seems like the opposite is true.

Read the rest of this entry →

Political pundits on both sides on the border often marvel at how the SNP appear able to defy the normal rules of electoral gravity, still holding a comfortable double-digit lead in the polls after more than 11 years in power. But there’s no great mystery to it, and the answer is simple, in several senses of that word.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to present to you Scottish Labour’s offering for who’d be in charge of all the Scottish Government’s money if the SNP weren’t in power – finance spokesman James Kelly MSP.

Let’s check those numbers, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re seriously starting to think there’s some sort of competition going on among the Unionist parties of Scotland to see who’s the thickest. We’ve spent quite a bit of time pointing out the scarcely-believable dimness of the Scottish Conservative benches, but this week Scottish Labour really pulled out the stops to try to seize back the initiative.

As a warm-up act they came out swinging with one of their big hitters (which for taste reasons we’ve expressed as rhyming slang) in the form of our dear old pal and former Edinburgh South CLP chair Duncan Hothersall – last seen attacking a six-year-old girl for selling 50p cups of lemonade to thirsty festivalgoers – who impressively contrived to badly lose an argument with a bridge.

But hilarious as that was, it wasn’t the high point by a distance.

Read the rest of this entry →

And no, we don’t even mean the FOUR spelling mistakes in this 42-word tweet.

We mean the bit that we’ve highlighted above in blue. Because what Scottish Labour’s lowest-watt bulb was gloating about earlier today was that Lord Bracadale concluded there’d been no gap created in the law by the Kelly-driven abolition of the OBFA.

And that’s… well, that’s not quite what Lord Bracadale said.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is from one of the first ever articles we wrote on Wings, just a couple of weeks after the site’s launch way back in November 2011:

Depressingly, some people still don’t get it.

Read the rest of this entry →

We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!

At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.

And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.

Read the rest of this entry →