Wings Over Scotland

There’s nothing unusual about reading something in the Scottish media that makes your eyes widen. But a piece we saw in the Courier earlier today stretched ours out to Clockwork Orange-like proportions.

Now that’s a pretty intriguing opening (as the bishop said to the actress). At first we took it to mean that an independent Scotland could effectively take over Britain’s EU membership in the event of a Leave vote, ending any debate about whether and when it would be admitted on its own.

But then the punchline arrived.

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The title of this article is a phrase that people use when publishing a transcript of someone’s intended speech, to signify that this is what they INTENDED to say, but that the reader should verify it with the actual speech to check whether they did, because sometimes there are last-minute changes or the person simply forgets bits.

The above is Kezia Dugdale’s scripted speech to the Scottish Labour conference in October 2015, just 94 days before calling for an income tax increase for “hundreds of thousands of working Scots”.

Sometimes leaving stuff out by accident looks like the smart move.

There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian about the clown-shoed fiasco of a position the Labour Party has contorted itself into over Trident. It correctly identifies the conflict between a party representing its actual membership and being controlled by its Parliamentarians who insist they know better than the people they’re supposed to speak for, but then right at the end veers off to an irrational conclusion.

Because the obsessive insistence of the vast majority of commentators that political parties – and they’re nearly always talking about Labour – must at all times pander to the centre ground leads inescapably to one logical endpoint: that all political parties should disband themselves immediately and forever.

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A revealing moment from a meeting of the UK parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee last Tuesday, featuring the former Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean.

Who knew, eh?

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Scottish Labour’s announcement that it wants to increase tax for everyone earning over £20k (and therefore anyone on under that who fancies making a little bit more, or might do a wee bit of extra overtime), reflects its acceptance both that the far left is in charge now and that this year’s Holyrood race is virtually over already.

SNP party folk will “take nothing for granted”, of course, and some aficionados might find it fun to see which candidates slink into list seats after they’ve lost the votes which count, but I’m really much more interested in what will come after that.

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From an excellent letter in today’s Herald by Chris McLaughlin of Giffnock:

The only fault in Chris’ logic is that he’s a bit too generous to Labour.

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

STV have leaked the results of Scottish Labour’s list-candidate rankings. Alert readers will recall that Kezia Dugdale promised that her leadership would see an influx of “new talent and fresh faces” to the beleaguered branch office’s ranks.

So let’s see how that panned out.

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Sometimes it’s the smallest, most trivial things that give you away. Graham Grant is the Home Affairs Editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, and earlier this morning he tweeted this snarky dig at prominent independence supporter and pundit Pat Kane, also of the primarily-1980s band Hue And Cry:

Ostensibly it’s a throwaway gag aimed at puncturing an opponent’s pomposity and over-inflated self-regard while portraying the journalist as an arch, wise cynic.

But hold on a second.

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From a Daily Record vox pop today on Scottish Labour’s tax plan.

Seems there are some things nearly everyone agrees on.

The headline of this article is a personal opinion derived from true facts. The popular associate of a prominent anonymous and abusive internet troll has undertaken more than 50 lawsuits against the press, and has admitted in an interview with The Times that she’s “too thin-skinned” when it comes to people writing critically about her.

That seems to us to be fair and factual evidence in support of “litigious”.

“Bully”, meanwhile, is an honestly-held opinion related to those facts, based on the following definitions of that word from the Oxford English Dictionary:

For example, we consider that actively and publicly threatening to use your enormous financial power to sue someone, unless they back down over a highly questionable claim of defamation and donate money to your charity, is beyond reasonable-minded dispute “using your superior strength or influence” to “intimidate” them.

(This is particularly true if you interact with the person by unnecessarily involving your audience of 6.6 million social-media followers, a percentage of whom will then be highly likely to bombard them with abuse, whether you intend them to or not. Even aside from direct abuse, McGarry received in excess of 75,000 Twitter notifications simply as a result of Rowling’s tweets mentioning her.)

And there’s a reason we mention this.

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It’s been a fair few months since we last documented the Daily Record’s increasingly panicky attempts to save its own hide over its infamous eve-of-referendum “Vow”.

In its growing desperation, the paper bizarrely turns today to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, demanding that SHE should be the one to fulfil a promise that the Record made specifically in order to thwart Sturgeon’s lifelong goal of independence.

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