Wings Over Scotland

We don’t often have cause to praise the actions of Tory councillors, so allow us to take the opportunity to salute Cllr David Meikle of Pollokshields for this intervention against braying Spectator idiot (and former star of our Zany Comedy Relief section) Fraser Nelson:

Ooft! Oddly, Nelson hasn’t rushed to also claim Gordon Reid as “British”, despite his being so in just the same way Andy Murray is – perhaps because Gordon and his Dutch doubles partner in fact lost their semi-final yesterday against the top seeds.

We’d previously dismissed the complaint as a tired old nationalist chip-on-the-shoulder hobbyhorse, but it seems that – to BritNats like Nelson at least – it really IS true that sportspeople from Scotland are British when they win and Scottish when they lose.

As veteran readers will know, we like to keep our blogroll fresh so that it offers only the leanest and juiciest collection of unmissable sites for when you’ve devoured every last page of Wings Over Scotland. This month we’ve had a small prune to make room for some new blood, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.

Out go the Herald and Scotsman because, hey, you know fine where the Herald and Scotsman are. That freed a couple of slots which we’ve given to the all-encompassing “Dundee wifey” Subrosa and Liberal Democrat Voters For Independence, both very welcome additions which broaden our outlook considerably.

We’ve also hoofed the Spectator’s braying Fraser Nelson out of the Zany Comedy Relief section for not gracing us with any Scottish-themed doltishness in weeks, and his replacement is a grassroots Labour blog that we think you’re going to love to bits. Ladies and gents, please revel in the positive case for the Union that is Niko’s Bar.

Otherwise, as you were. Suggestions always welcomed.

With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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Impressively we’ve managed to sneeze so powerfully and manfully today that we blew a filling out, so while we go off to the dentist to have it nailed back in here are a few of the better pieces from the Scottish political media and blogosphere over the last few days, in case any of them passed you by.

Alex Massie’s been in a fine vein of form recently on the Spectator, and this analysis of Ed Miliband’s comments on Scotland was particularly insightful. We were also pleased to stumble across this archive piece from a year ago echoing almost exactly our own recent question on the same theme, which remains unanswered.

Stephen Noon blogs much less frequently than Mr Massie, but when he does it’s usually a cracker, and this related piece is no exception, while Kate Higgins shows what she can do when she’s not randomly calling people misogynists with this excellent study of the topic. And finally on Murdochgate, Newsnet Scotland makes an interesting and telling observation that went unnoticed by anyone else.

Away from the Murdoch issue, we don’t often find much to commend in the Telegraph – and less still from Fraser Nelson – but we couldn’t fault this look at “tricolour Britain”. And the increasingly impressive A Sair Fecht enlightened us with an illuminating history of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, founder of the Scottish Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and the National Party of Scotland, one of the forerunners of the SNP.

That should take you through lunch. We’re off to the bone-driller.

Nobody starts a blog because they want to. It’s time-consuming, it costs money, and it opens you up to all manner of hideous abuse. In my 20-year career as a professional journalist I’ve had my home address and home phone number published countless times, usually accompanied by implied or explicit exhortations for people to come round and kick my head in. I’ve been the subject of more than one hate campaign so prolonged, vitriolic and alarming that serious police intervention was required. I lost count of the death threats (some of them made to my face) years ago. And the sheer volume of venomous, hysterical name-calling and general rage that’s been directed my way would fill every page of the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica and more.

(I should note, in the interests of fairness, that if it comes to a flame war I’m no fainting violet myself, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. In the circumstances, sometimes you’ve just got to let off a little steam or you’d go completely mad. I have very little time for sites that get all prissy about a good honest ding-dong.)

This blog carries no advertising. I’m freelance, and every hour I spend researching, checking, writing and maintaining it is an hour when I’m not earning money to pay for the (extortionate) rent, the (crippling) utility bills and the (debilitating) weakness for imported salt’n’vinegar flavour KP Mini Chips. Like the vast majority of others, I mostly blog – to coin a phrase – not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but out of frustration at an unheard, unrepresented voice.

Wings Over Scotland arose for just that reason. I’d been searching for a while for a Scottish political blog that wasn’t abysmally written, appallingly designed, intellectually embarrassing or all three, and in 2011 I briefly thought I’d discovered it in an earlier version of Better Nation. That illusion lasted for the few hours it took to be summarily banned, without warning or explanation (and by person or persons still unidentified), from commenting on my own article. It was at this point I reluctantly acknowledged that I couldn’t count on being able to express my uncensored views on Scottish politics anywhere unless I took matters into my own hands.

The blog’s been running for five months now, and has seen a pleasingly rapid growth in readership – monthly page views are now in six figures, and monthly unique users well into five figures. (We note, curiously, that almost no other blogs reveal their traffic levels even to that degree.) In that time we’ve also become much more intimately acquainted with the rest of the Scottish online media, both professional and blogosphere, and a few interesting things have become apparent. And since today’s a bit of a slow news day, it seems as good a time as any to examine some of them.

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A large and imposing statue built in 1974 still stands today on Clyde Street in Glasgow. It depicts a woman called Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, who was one of the heroes of the anti-fascist resistance in Spain in the 1930s.

The statue was funded by “the British Labour Movement”, but Conservative councillors in the city protested angrily when it was erected and vowed to tear it down if they ever controlled the council (which cynical readers might consider an empty threat).

How times change. Read the rest of this entry →