We never got a response to our last job application, but we’re not easily dispirited here at Wings, so we’re trying again.
So little is happening in Scottish politics at the moment that we need SOMETHING to do all day. And let’s face it, the bar to improve on the previous incumbent isn’t high.
We long ago ran out of words to express the magnitude of the contempt in which the SNP now hold the people of Scotland. Which is unfortunate, because this probably calls for the invention of a whole new scale.
Shall we go through just a few of the more crassly insulting holes in this pitiful excuse for a cover story, just to pass the time while we wait for the former First Minister to appear before the COVID inquiry? We don’t know about you, but we’ve got nothing better to do.
We make no apology for returning once again to the depressing subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.
Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.
Well, this’d bring a tear to a glass eye.
Yeah, whatever DID happen to that?
Just under four years ago the world was hit by a pandemic that spread like wildfire and caused misery wherever it reached. It’ll be remembered by almost everyone who lived through it, especially those who worked to protect society’s most vulnerable.
We’ve all heard about its effect on our NHS, but less so on those working within social care. As the COVID inquiries on both sides of the border continue to reveal more and more troubling information, Wings readers should hear the story of what it was like to work in social care in Scotland during the COVID pandemic.
Yesterday was “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, which was the 41st “special” day of 2023 so far for trans people.
(Including but not limited to International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; International Pronouns Day; International Transgender Day Of Visibility; Transgender Awareness Week and of course the whole of “Pride Month”, which is now an almost entirely trans-focused event).
Citizens of Scotland and the UK were solemnly instructed to “remember the many trans people whose lives have been tragically cut short by violence”, although weirdly none of the politicians issuing the orders actually named any.
However, since we’re endlessly being told that trans people are the most marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable members of our society, and that an actual “trans genocide” is currently in progress, we expect there have been loads.
Zilch continues to happen in Scottish politics, so to pass a bleak November afternoon we’re going to do something we haven’t done on Wings for years: talk about football.
Try not to panic, because it’s really about the Scottish media – just like it used to be back in the good old days when they, rather than the SNP, were the main obstacles to Scottish independence. But there’s going to be quite a bit of football involved along the way, so if you can’t bear it, just go and stare out of the window and wait for Spring.
As alert readers will have noticed, Wings has been perusing the SNP’s Governance And Transparency Review over the last couple of days, a document which tentatively attempts to discern just how big a mess the party’s previous leadership has left it in.
(SPOILER: a really big one.)
The paper has now also reached the mainstream media.
Wings already touched on that particular aspect of the party’s mismanagement back in August, but in the light of the report now formally acknowledging the problem it’s worth taking a moment to establish just how astonishingly bad it is.
The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.
The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.
The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.
But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.
Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.
(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month.)
For around 40 years of my life, I had an easy one-word answer to being asked if I was in favour of independence for Scotland, and that answer was “Yes”. If you’d pushed me to expand, I’d have said “Yes, obviously“.
Even though my dad was employed by the SNP leader of the time – in his non-SNP capacity as a business owner – politics wasn’t discussed in our house. (These were the 1970s, so there wasn’t a vast amount of discussion full stop.) But I was raised, basically by default, with the view that Scotland was a country.
Of course it was a country. It had its own dialect and an identifiable culture, both things personified to my young self by Oor Wullie and The Broons, and our weekly visits to my granny’s wooden bungalow in a wee ancient village near Cumbernauld that may as well have been Auchenshoogle (weirdly, sometimes “Auchentogle”).
It had national football and rugby teams. It had a flag. Why would it be any less of a country than Germany or Italy or Holland or Brazil or Argentina? (My knowledge of geography was primarily World Cup-based.)
So as soon as I had even the vaguest notion of the concept of politics – probably around the age of 7 or 8 – it seemed straightforwardly axiomatic to me that it should be independent. There was never even a thought process, it was just mad and unnatural to think otherwise, like believing the sea was orange. Countries run their own affairs, right? And that was it for the next 40-odd years.
(Post-2007, when I started to seriously examine the idea, the feeling only solidified.)
But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer is different. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.
Yesterday we took an extensive tour of all the red flags in the SNP’s 2022 accounts, which show a party in very deep financial trouble. But there was one part we left out because it deserves a post of its own.
The picture above – which was posted by then-CEO Peter Murrell during last year’s SNP conference – is a revealing one in all kinds of ways.
It starkly exposes how a party chose to hold an event for around 800 members in a venue with a capacity of 15,000 and then went to a lot of effort to disguise how empty the space was, rather than, for example, just hiring somewhere of an appropriate size (and cost) in the first place.
(Look how far into the hall the stage has been placed, leaving half the arena vacant, to then be hidden behind a giant screen and curtains and banners in order to give a false impression of how full it is.)
But what’s more symbolic is that there are almost no people in it.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
