Wings Over Scotland

Attentive viewers will recall this blog’s investigative journalism of last month, when we went searching for Scotland’s most prominent missing person – Scottish Labour’s alleged leader Johann Lamont. We were so concerned about her sudden dramatic disappearance from the nation’s airwaves shortly after her election that we were prompted to start an ongoing daily log of all political appearances on the Scottish media, which a couple of you have even very kindly been helping us to maintain.

With the Scottish Parliament in recess for Easter and the first quarter of 2012 just over, it seemed a good time to take a look at the old scoreboard, and as for the results… well, you’ll have had bigger surprises, let’s put it like that.

Read the rest of this entry →

———————————————————————————————————————–

“It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it.” – Terry Pratchett, author

———————————————————————————————————————–

Wings Over Scotland is a Scottish political website, which focuses particularly on the media – whether mainstream print and broadcast organisations or the online and social-network community – as well as offering its own commentary and analysis.

“Arguably the most exciting, invigorating and innovative entrant to the Scottish media world in recent years.”
– Stephen Daisley (STV News)

“Irrevocably transformed online politics in Britain.”
– Scott Hames/Dominic Hinde (New Statesman)

“Irreverent, brave, challenging, intelligent and often brilliant analysis.”
– Colin Meek (Journalism.co.uk)

“The Mumsnet of the independence movement.”
– Ross McCafferty (Daily Record)

“A highly controversial cyber organisation.”
– Barbara Davies (Daily Mail)

“The problem voice of unthinking Scottish nationalism.”
– Gerry Hassan (Sunday Mail)

“Keeping up with the activies of the media phenomenon that is Wings Over Scotland would wear out your mouse.”
– Michael Gray (Common Space/The National)

“The hate-filled website Wings Over Scotland.”
– Emma Cowing (Daily Mail)

“A world of conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia. This is a brand of nationalism that seeks to peddle falsehoods and unfounded allegations against anyone who isn’t a believer. It is nasty, sewage politics that debases public life. And yet the Wings Over Scotland [sic] is cited as an authoritative source by some leading SNP figures who really should know better.”
– Murray Foote (Daily Record)

“The nastiest hate blog in the UK.”
– Muriel Gray (broadcaster and former independence supporter)

“Journalists don’t like Wings much, but the simple fact is that if you’re looking for forensic analysis then you’re much more likely to find it at Wings than in the pages of much of the papers.”
– Eric Joyce (former Labour MP)

“A new and awful low in Scottish politics.”
– Margaret Curran (former Labour MP)

“As relevant a source as the Financial Times.”
– Kezia Dugdale (former leader, Scottish Labour Party)

“The press hate Wings Over Scotland, not least because it is a rival. But for hundreds of thousands of Scots it was an invaluable source of facts and arguments with which to challenge the predominantly unionist message of the mainstream media.”
– Iain Macwhirter (The Herald/Sunday Herald)

“Wings Over Scotland is the nation’s most trusted media outlet.”
– Brian Ferguson (The Scotsman)

“Enabling a new breed of fascism.”
– Peter Jukes (Byline.com)

“Wings Over Scotland really is the most effective, wide reaching and important media of communication available to the Scottish independence movement.”
– Craig Murray (former UK diplomat and ambassador to Uzbekistan)

“A pugnacious website popular among sections of the alt-Nat community. Its proprietor, Stuart Campbell, has a way of expressing himself in a colourful style.”
– Alex Massie (The Times)

“Clever and highly effective.”
– Duncan Hothersall (Scottish Labour activist and party chair)

“Wings Over Scotland is the most reprehensible extreme of the independence movement. The organisation would be far and away the most despicable participant ever to have sought involvement in Holyrood.”
– unnamed Scottish Conservatives spokesman

“The SNP’s answer to Voldemort.”
– Alyn Smith (SNP MP)

“The most powerful political blog in Scotland.”
– Mark Devlin, (“The Majority”, pro-Union activist group)

“A curry for anyone who can tell me who Wings Over Scotland is.”
– Euan McColm (Scotland On Sunday)

As Mr McColm would have known had he applied his fearsome investigative skills to reading the byline that’s always been clearly printed at the top of each of the site’s articles, or indeed by reading this ever-present page, Wings is owned and edited by the Rev. Stuart Campbell, a Liberal Democrat voter at every election from 1992 to 2010 inclusive and, reluctantly, in 2017. (2015 general election vote: spoiled paper.)

“Campbell is the maverick blogger who has arguably done more than anybody, bar First Minister Alex Salmond, to break up Britain. A threat to the nation.”
– Ben Bryant (VICE)

“A bit of a rebel, a buccaneer and a brigand who’s got far too much to say for himself. He doesn’t retreat and gets into fights with everyone. Newspapers used to be like that too. I like his style.”
– Kevin McKenna (The Observer)

“The poster boy for a certain type of online independence campaigner… an IT-literate troublemaker.”
– Paul Hutcheon (Sunday Herald)

“Spiritual leader of the conspiracists… prone to the kind of intemperate rants that have helped to turn Twitter into such a toxic environment.”
– Graham Grant (Daily Mail)

“A significant number of people appear to be using this one man’s personal opinion to decide how to vote in the referendum.”
– Ben Borland (Scottish Sunday Express)

“Whether you love, loathe or grudgingly respect him, the Bath-based nationalist is the Yes movement’s most influential opinion shaper, excluding Nicola Sturgeon herself… as famed for his vitriolic style as he is for his robust, landscape-shifting journalism.”
– Darren McGarvey (The Scotsman)

“He might be from the Dark Side, if you know what I mean.”
– Lt Col Stuart Crawford (Royal Tank Regiment, ret’d)

“King of the Cybernats.”
– Tom Harris (former Labour MP and UK government minister)

“The Wings cretin is like a human sewer.”
– Chris Deerin (Telegraph/Daily Mail)

“This ambulatory piece of excrement.”
– Brooke “Belle De Jour” Magnanti (prostitute turned author)

“The voice of sanity.”
– Jim Spence (broadcaster and journalist, BBC Scotland/The Courier)

“A master of calumny.”
– Roderick W. Dunlop (Queen’s Counsel)

“A man of principle.”
– Sheriff Nigel A. Ross (Edinburgh Sheriff Court)

“The outlaw king of the nationalist hardcore, a sarcastic outsider laying waste to Scotland’s overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media”
– Scott Hames/Dominic Hinde (New Statesman)

“The vilest possible person.”
– Susan Calman (BBC Radio 4)

“A white, middle-aged, hate-filled troll.”
– Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour Party leader)

“He is absolutely vile, and through his divisive demagoguery he more than any other single individual could present the biggest threat to our independence.”
– Pete Wishart (super-comfortable SNP MP)

“A lot of people really value what you do.”
– Kevin Scott (The Herald, PricewaterhouseCoopers)

“Wings is a law unto himself. He takes instructions from no-one.”
– James Kelly (Scot Goes Pop)

“That snake oil salesman… a low quality propagandist.”
– Michael White (The Guardian)

“Stuart Campbell has wound up a lot of people because his media-monitoring service often destroys and points up the hypocrisies and the mistakes and the misdirections of the so-called mainstream media, and I think his service is an extremely good service.”
– Stuart Cosgrove (author and broadcaster, BBC/Channel 4)

“The SNP’s Cybernat General.”
– Jackie Baillie (Labour MSP)

“Articulate, fluent and smart… Bathgate’s answer to Jane Austen.”
– Kenny Farquharson (The Times)

“Abusive online wingnut.”
– Blair McDougall (Director of “Better Together” campaign)

“One of Twitter’s prominent spewers of invective.”
– Gillian Bowditch (Sunday Times)

“Deranged maniac… a little bit nuts.”
– David Torrance (The Herald)

“I am not responsible for Stuart Campbell.”
– Nicola Sturgeon (First Minister of Scotland)

The site advocates Scottish independence, but is not affiliated or connected in any way to the SNP, and neither gives to or receives money from the party, nor indeed any other party. We have an inquiring mind, and welcome intelligent contributions from all sides of the political debate.

Got something worthwhile to say about Scotland’s future? Try us.

.

COMMENTING

Wings Over Scotland has an open comments policy – if you’re a new user your first comment needs to be manually approved as an anti-spam measure, but after that anything you say will be published automatically and unmoderated, and without making users negotiate irritating Captchas or social-media registrations/logins.

However, please note that the Akismet spam filter built in to all WordPress sites will sometimes place comments which contain links – and particularly multiple links – into the moderation queue, even from approved users. Such comments won’t appear until we manually accept them, which can take anything from a few seconds to several hours if we’re out at the shops or something.

This is outwith our control, unless we want to be swamped by the literally thousands of spambot messages a day that Akismet intercepts. If you want to post several links, it’s best to do it in several comments with one link in each.

We reserve the right to edit/remove comments at any time, for legal reasons or in the event of sustained personal abuse, trolling that’s aimed purely and intentionally at disrupting rather than promoting debate, or spam which somehow manages to evade Akismet. But you’ll have to try very hard indeed, and ignore repeated warnings, to have any sort of censorship for content applied here.

.

ETIQUETTE AND FORMATTING

There are, however, some rules. As the site’s readership has grown, so has the number of comments. Four-figure numbers in a single day aren’t unprecedented, and that brings with it certain responsibilities for commenters, because we can’t spend all day monitoring them and still produce the site. So please keep a few things in mind.

1. Write as if an undecided voter is reading.

Fewer than 1% of the site’s readers post comments. That means the comments give you an inaccurate picture of the overall readership, and things that might go down well within a small group of dedicated activists don’t sound so good to people who’ve come to the site looking for information to help make up their minds.

People without whom we won’t win.

So try to avoid puerile name-calling like “Bitter Together”, “Johann Lamentable” or hilarious mis-spellings/puns of Anas Sarwar’s name. The same goes for things like “Liebore”, “Wastemonster” and “Daily Retard”, and words like “Quisling” and “traitor”.

Do you think they’re more likely to win someone over, or to put them off? Would they work on you if the positions were reversed? If not, don’t say them.

(We’d also happily live for another 300 years without ever again seeing anyone using the phrase “parcel of rogues” as if they were the first person who ever thought of it, or posting entire poems or song lyrics. That’s what YouTube’s for.)

Use of the word “rape” to refer to anything other than the criminal offence is also unwelcome. So the sentence “Wastemonster has been raping Scotland for decades, but you’ll never hear those Liebore-apologist traitors at the Daily Retard reporting it”… well, don’t hold your breath waiting for that comment to show up, is what we’re saying.

2. Play the ball, not the man (or woman).

And by all means disagree, by all means disagree forcefully – but argue with people’s views, don’t insult them personally. And that includes calling them “trolls” or implying they’re undercover Unionists. We’ll decide if someone’s trolling or not. But in the meantime, if you think they are, ignore them.

If you know what a “troll” is, then you’ll also know that getting you angry and talking about them, derailing the conversation off the subject, is exactly what they want.

Email us about suspected trolls if you want. But don’t engage them in debate if you doubt their motives, and DEFINITELY don’t engage in on-thread discussions about whether they’re a troll or not.

3. Show other commenters some courtesy.

It’d be nice if all that ever mattered was the content of what you wrote. But it isn’t. Whether we like it or not, the way things look also has a huge effect on whether people read them and pay any attention.

If you post a comment that’s 3,000 words long but doesn’t have a single line break or punctuation mark, not one living soul will read it. But more importantly, the chances are that they won’t read anything that comes after it either, and that’s an arrogant and selfish thing to do to other people’s comments. We have some amazing commenters here, and they deserve not to have the information they impart undermined.

So please, please, please put some paragraphs breaks into your posts. One after every two or three sentences is a good ballpark figure. And as you’re using the internet, not a typewriter, there’s NEVER, EVER any reason for hitting Return once. It’s either none or two, depending whether you’re starting a new paragraph or not.

Terrible use of paragraph breaks (which includes using none, or far too many, or sticking loads of extra ones at the beginning or end of your post for no appreciable reason) will put your comment at severe risk of deletion.

4. Microsoft are evil.

Please don’t paste comments in from Microsoft Word. It creates utter havoc, because Microsoft are made of liquid incompetence and general horror. (Ref: Windows 8.)

5. There’s a time and place for everything.

Comment threads go off-topic. That’s okay. But posting about a completely different subject in the first few comments on an article is just mind-bogglingly rude.

If you have something totally unrelated that you really really have to say, either post it in an older thread or just bite your tongue for the four or five minutes it’ll take for there to be half-a-dozen on-topic comments. Break this rule and you’ll either get timestamp-shifted to two hours into the future or deleted, depending how cranky a mood we’re in.

6. Scotland has a world-renowned education system.

So there’s really no excuse for putting spaces before full stops and question marks at the end of sentences, or for starting your paragraphs with an indentation. Or for doing this: “…………………………..” or this: “ .  .  .  .  .  . ” when you mean this: “…“.

Or for not at least knowing that sentences start with a capital letter.

Your comment won’t be deleted for breaking those sorts of rules, but please believe us when we say that if you do we’ll be positively itching to find other reasons.

7. Don’t mess up the page for everyone else.

If you post YouTube links with the http:// part at the start, they’ll embed on the page rather than being posted as links. That can lead to this sort of thing. So don’t include the http:// bit or you’ll find your video in the spam bin.

8. Remember you’re talking to people.

If you were in the pub with some friends and someone asked you what you wanted to drink, would you say “Pint of lager shandy, please, Bob. ALBA GU BRATH!”? If you wouldn’t bellow slogans at them every time you’d finished speaking, then don’t do it in bloody comments either.

The same goes for signing your name at the bottom of your comment. We can see your name on the left-hand side already. If you want people to know you’re called Steve, call yourself Steve in the name box, not “Super_Sovereign_Warrior952”.

.I

Please note that spelling errors and typos are excluded from our grammar-Nazi purge. Being dyslexic isn’t a crime. But for the other stuff – especially the absence of line breaks – there will be no mercy. Those are the rules. That is all.

Wow. That’s Monica Lennon sat directly behind him, by the way.

That must have taken some amount of polishing.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve got to admit, the Yorkshire chap makes a fair point.

God bless ’em, they just never lose the faith, do they?

Read the rest of this entry →

The Times today carries an article sparking the annual revival of one of the evergreen mysteries of Scottish politics: just how many (or more accurately, how few) people are in the Scottish Labour Party?

The piece sees leadership contest avoider Alex Rowley crowing about a fall in the SNP’s membership income, based on this year’s party accounts as just released by the Electoral Commission.

So we thought we’d take a look at some numbers.

Read the rest of this entry →

The mainstream media is now, by our count, up to at least 13 sizeable articles on the Great Yes-Movement Schism Of 2017 – a minor online spat between a tiny handful of people who’ve never liked each other and most of whom the general public has never heard of – and shows no signs of tiring of gleefully revelling in the subject.

There’s nothing particularly surprising or even diabolical about that. As any reality-TV show viewer will tell you, viewers absolutely love to watch people fighting, and doubly so if it’s the summer silly season and there’s no real news. Most of the stories have attracted large responses and therefore lots of juicy and profitable clicks for tired hacks who long ago stopped having anything of any interest to say but still have to honk out 1000 words a week in order to get paid.

But the more sinister aspect of them is the way they’ve been weaponised to (further) demonise and silence the Yes movement. If someone attacks other Yes figures with a provocative, offensive and dishonest piece, the extra bonus for the media is that any legitimately angry response to it can be used as yet more proof of The Vileness Of The Cybernats: “Look! They even turn on their own if they dare disagree!”

For the Unionist press, that’s a win-win every way up, and there are some on the Yes side who seem only too willing to co-operate with the narrative.

Read the rest of this entry →

Particularly alert readers may recall a phenomenon we haven’t covered much recently, whereby aspects of politics magically transform as they cross the border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. But this week we’ve had a sighting in a new area.

Sounds pretty bad for poor old Wales.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.

It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.

This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:

Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.

Read the rest of this entry →

Yesterday we drew attention to a disgracefully untrue claim made by the leader of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To A Second Referendum Party at the day’s FMQs.

Davidson had attempted to pass off the personal views of just THREE members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as representing the official position of the august and 125,000-strong body. It’s the sort of bare-faced lie we’re sadly accustomed to hearing from opposition leaders in the chamber, but it was also an illustration of a much wider and depressingly-growing phenomenon.

Let’s learn about it together.

Read the rest of this entry →

BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.

While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.

And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.

So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alert social-media users couldn’t have failed to notice Unionist activists and hacks working themselves up into a very great lather last night over (currently former) SNP MP Michelle Thomson. The ex-director of Business For Scotland has resigned the party whip and is now sitting, at least temporarily, as an independent while police conduct an investigation into some property purchases in which she was involved.

As yet no criminal activity by anyone has been alleged, and Police Scotland has said that it has no plans at the moment to even interview Ms Thomson, let alone arrest or charge her. As yet it’s a political non-story.

But the mere proximity of the member for Edinburgh West – previously the victim of a smear related to the Ashley Madison website hacking – to even a sniff of impropriety has triggered a paroxysm amongst the media and the beleagured opposition.

Amusingly, some senior journalists have even tweeted an accusatory blog written by Labour activist and regular BBC pundit Ian Smart, whose own membership of the Labour Party remains a subject of uncertainty after a series of abusive incidents – Scottish Labour have persistently refused to confirm whether he’s been expelled, despite having been “investigating” him since April.

But that’s not the most interesting piece of hypocrisy on show.

Read the rest of this entry →