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Wings Over Scotland


So you don’t have to 133

Posted on September 07, 2015 by

We’re watching the Alistair Carmichael court hearing today. It’s monumentally boring, and likely to go on for much of today and tomorrow.

stvac

If you want to see for yourself it’s being broadcast on STV, BBC and Indy Live. But we really, really don’t advise it.

Glass half-chucked 165

Posted on September 06, 2015 by

A very brief post about football, because it was irritating to listen to the avalanche of gloom on social media on Friday night as Scotland lost to Georgia (again), and then have to watch this honking oaf go trolling.

kellyscotland

Shut your faces, all of you.

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Your hair is beautiful tonight 6

Posted on September 05, 2015 by

You know that bit in Superman 2 where Superman is forced by General Zod and his evil Krypton buddies into the magic power-removing chamber, except that Supes has somehow cunningly rewired it so that the space rays or whatever get deflected to everywhere OUTSIDE the chamber instead and they're the ones that lose all their powers while he stays super?

dismaland1

That's basically what's happened in Weston-super-Mare this month.

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Flowering up 251

Posted on September 05, 2015 by

flowered

Nothing but repeats 193

Posted on September 04, 2015 by

Summer is, as we’ve said before, the “silly season” for politics. Wings readers will have noticed that like everywhere else, we’ve been rather lighter on content than usual for the last three months as politicians celebrated their general election victories by giving themselves long holidays – sorry, “time for constituency work” – and in the absence of a referendum campaign to fill the gap there wasn’t much going on.

So we can’t blame the media for raking over old ground in search of anything to fill threadbare column inches with. But it’s less excusable when the things they choose to reheat, repackage and reissue are ancient, endlessly-disproven lies.

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Conservative and Unionist of the day 218

Posted on September 03, 2015 by

Party member. We’re sure Ruth Davidson (who follows him) will take prompt action.

leary

She will, won’t she?

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We don’t not need no education 360

Posted on September 02, 2015 by

Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Parliament yesterday:

The daughter of two teachers, there.

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The lesser of two stupids 673

Posted on September 01, 2015 by

Let’s start off by losing some more friends. This site has no time for the Gaelic lobby. The obsolete language spoken by just 0.9% of Scotland’s population might be part of the nation’s “cultural heritage”, but so were burning witches and replacing Highlanders with sheep and we don’t do those any more either.

Being multilingual is an excellent thing, but the significant amount of time and effort taken to learn a literally-pointless second language (because everyone you can talk to in Gaelic already understood English) would be vastly better directed to picking up one that was actually of some use, and every extra fraction of a second spent scanning a road sign trying to find the bit you can read is a fraction of a second spent with your eyes off the road.

Non-primary native languages are a tool whose main utility in practice is at best the exclusion of outsiders, and at worst an expression of dodgy blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism. They’re a barrier to communication and an irritation to the vast majority of the population, who are made to feel like uncultured aliens in their own land.

But we’d still rather put up with Gaelic than complete idiots making our laws.

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The new binary 254

Posted on August 31, 2015 by

We can’t help feeling there’s a simpler way of putting that.

brightgreen

The angriest man in Scotland 475

Posted on August 28, 2015 by

We were greatly amused to learn this morning that Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University, the bad-tempered darling of the Scottish Conservatives and the only political pundit who can make Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph seem measured and thoughtful, plans to stand for election to the Scottish Parliament next May.

uniontwat3

We suspect he’ll succeed, too. It now seems plain that Ruth Davidson’s move earlier this month from the Glasgow list to the Lothian one was a ploy to get Prof. Tomkins to the top of the former, and while a Tory list seat in Glasgow is by no means a certainty next year, it’s more likely than not.

(We’ll be somewhat startled if the irritable English academic finds the courage to even try contesting a constituency in Scotland’s largest city. It’s moderately possible that his abrasive hectoring of Scottish voters’ stupidity in continuing to elect the SNP might not go down too well in the council schemes of Easterhouse and Drumchapel.)

Trying to pick out the funniest line in the announcement is no easy task.

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The journey 285

Posted on August 27, 2015 by

Then:

republicandarling2

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War is declared, and battle come down 113

Posted on August 27, 2015 by

Yesterday we noted an interesting apparent shift in the BBC’s political stance with regard to Scotland. Two serving senior political reporters have made open attacks on the SNP, backed up by other media and politicians, seemingly abandoning all notions of the impartiality to which the BBC is bound by charter.

(The Guardian’s hostile editorial was particularly bizarre, suggesting that devolving control of broadcasting in Scotland to Holyrood would turn the BBC into a mouthpiece of government, which inescapably suggests that the current Westminster-controlled BBC is a tool of either Labour or the Tories, depending which one is in power.)

This morning’s edition of The Times is the latest to join the offensive.

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