Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will have noticed that the Conservatives and most of the right-wing press have recently embarked on a hyperbolic campaign against the Scottish Government’s “named person” child-protection legislation. The latest assault is in today’s Daily Mail:

The shriekingly furious lead article thunders in outrage that “nearly two thirds of Scots have condemned the SNP’s state guardian scheme as an ‘unacceptable intrusion’ into family life”, which sounds like a pretty damning verdict.

It’s not until you look a little deeper that it all falls to pieces.

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It’s the “your” that makes it.

The next time you hear Scottish Labour whinge that nationalists have “stolen” the Saltire or some such, remember what they really think of it.

We were mucking about doing some other stuff today when we came across these. We thought they looked quite striking all put together.

No other reason than that, really.

We had a little Twitter run-in last night with former Scottish Labour deputy leader and current unemployed halfwit Anas Sarwar, when he reported us to Police Scotland for making a joke about bank holiday mail deliveries, “people in England” and “especially” Scottish ones – which of course includes this site’s own editor, that being the gag.

We’d almost forgotten he existed. But the incident brought something back to mind.

To be fair to Mr Sarwar, he was at least partly right.

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Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

Here’s a column from Kenny Farquharson in today’s tablet edition of the Times, which hasn’t made it onto the website. We don’t know if it’s in the print version.

Let’s just linger over those words for a moment.

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A message of hope for Good Friday from everyone’s favourite Labour activist:

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“Dry your eyes. On your feet.”

Sometimes the world’s random turns throw up a charmed piece of timing. That was the first tweet that I read on 19th September 2014, sitting on the side of the bed, eyes burning, wondering what on Earth I could possibly do with a day for which I’d bought champagne, but which broke my heart before dawn.

I’d resisted Twitter for a while, then fallen in love with it, weirdly comfortable with the disembodied voices of strangers. Small phrases, 140 characters: at its best, little postcards that made me smile, laugh or think.

For whatever reason, that tweet cut through, its arrival perfect to give me a virtual shake. I’d tell the writer – if I knew who they were – that I managed to carry out half of their instruction to us hollow-eyed, political orphans that day, though I failed miserably for a while on the first bit.

Today we should have become independent. We’re not, and it’s not okay, but since I don’t think we can ignore the power that time and timing can possess, and since words are all I’ve got, I’d like to tell you a story.

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Two front pages in the same newspaper, two weeks apart.

The top image is Scotland within the UK. The bottom one is an independent Scotland.

£5 billion better off with independence? We’d call that a no-brainer.

Scotland isn’t independent today.

Let’s not get fooled again.

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We hadn’t heard of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust until today. It turns out that it’s a sister organisation to the highly admirable Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which does great work highlighting and fighting issues around poverty and social injustice.

The Reform Trust, not so much.

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To mark the day when Scotland would have become independent had it voted Yes in 2014, the Scottish Conservatives have hired someone who sells dog food (not very successfully) for a living to produce a 37-page dossier about how absolutely dreadful Scotland is and how it would be the most bankrupt country in Europe – poorer than Greece, poorer than Latvia and poorer than Cyprus.

It wasn’t supposed to be released publicly until tomorrow, so that all the papers could splurge their loads on it, but someone found a copy that had been left on a bus and sent it to us. It’s incredibly dull, but if you really want to read it, it’s here.

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