Standing up for falling down 121
Here’s Kezia Dugdale back in August:
So thank goodness that’s all been cleared up.
Can open, worms everywhere 238
A convention of the world’s finest satirists pulling a 24-hour shift on Red Bull couldn’t come up with anything to beat Labour’s position on renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. Following an overwhelming vote at the Scottish Labour conference this afternoon, these are the current cut-out-and-keep standings:
But it’s even better than that.
A difference of recollection 60
Dear Wings Over Scotland,
It’s been brought to my attention that you recently shared a quote attributed to the TV presenter and Westminster political commentator Andrew Neil, and that in response Mr Neil has strongly denied making the statement in the quote, namely:
“Devolution, the Calman Commission, the Scotland Bill, the Edinburgh Agreement – all of this and more you have is because Westminster parties are scared of the SNP. If you vote ‘No’ you massively change the balance of power and they will not only give you nothing, but will probably take powers away from the Scottish Parliament”.
I find it very strange that he denies making that statement.
You are legion 61
Another three months have come and gone – where does the time get to, eh? – so it’s time for a quick Wings readership-stats update. There’s nothing particularly interesting or dramatic about them, so we’ll just give you the numbers and move on.
UNIQUE VISITORS IN OCTOBER 2015: 293,793
PAGE VIEWS: 4,616,334
In what’s been mostly a very sleepy time for politics, we’re thrilled with that.
Your time is precious 197
Kezia Dugdale spoke for almost exactly 45 minutes to the Scottish Labour conference in Perth today. But we know you’re busy people who don’t want to sit through all of that, and that you trust us to endure it on your behalf so that we can sift through it and present you with only the important bits.
So we recorded the whole thing, then edited out all the bits that were just “SNP BAD” (that one’s a real time-saver), all the empty rhetoric, all the non-specific pledges to make everything be cuddly and fabulous, and all the uncosted, impractical, half-baked policy ideas that have no hope of ever being put into practice.
In the end we got it down to under 10 minutes.
No need to thank us. It’s what we do.
God save your mad parade 168
When we watched Kezia Dugdale’s toe-curling moment on this week’s Question Time, we were immediately reminded of a mesmerising passage in Jon Savage’s masterful 1991 history of punk rock “England’s Dreaming”, in which he gives an account of the last ever Sex Pistols concert, at Winterland in San Francisco in 1978.
And like the show, Dugdale’s week just kept getting worse.
Walking the dog 90
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
The sunshine of socialism 162
We’re big fans of socialism ourselves, so when a number of delegates at the Scottish Labour conference today, including UK leader Jeremy Corbyn, revived an old Keir Hardie line we were quite excited.
We just thought it’d be more fun than this.
Let’s clear something up 153
Asking the question is the easy bit: “If the all-new, super-autonomous Scottish Labour decides to oppose the renewal of Trident, and UK Labour continues to support it, which way do Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster vote on it?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, was a lot more difficult to ascertain.
The missing paragraph 136
There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:
Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.
Why we love Twitter 408
Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Daily Mail this morning:
“We’re not like the SNP. This isn’t a party of robots that are given a chip and told what to think.”
Twitter’s response is below.




















