Wings Over Scotland

Can this really be six and a half years ago?

We suddenly feel very old.

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…until we can all start actually trying to achieve independence again.

(Unless they replace him with Kirsty sodding Blackman or something, obv.)

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The response to yesterday’s post was pretty unanimous. So let’s find out for real.

Wings Over Scotland has been produced for free for the last three and a half years. Our last operational fundraiser was in May 2019. Then again, we’ve been retired for nearly half that time, with only occasional new posts.

But Scottish politics has never been in a more dire state than it is now, with the SNP stolen from its members by a tiny cabal not interested in independence but only in power for its own sake and the “queering” of Scottish society, while the opposition is a worthless ragbag of hapless incompetents and the media is a national embarrassment.

And since Wings stood back from the fray 18 months ago, absolutely nothing has stepped up to take its place. So if you want the job doing, it looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves again.

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Between recesses and the mourning period for the Queen, the UK Parliament has been sitting for just four weeks since the 1st of July this year.

In that time the government has somehow managed to lose three Chancellors Of The Exchequer and is about to engage its fourth in the alarming form of Jeremy Hunt, a man whose primary claim to fame and utility to the UK is as rhyming slang.

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So we now know, if it was ever in doubt, that the Scottish Government is not remotely serious about holding an independence referendum in 2023.

Today’s speech by the First Minister revealed one positive act: that she finally intends to do what this website has been repeatedly calling on her to do since April 2018, by establishing once and for all whether or not the Scottish Parliament has the power to conduct an independence referendum, and that if it is determined by the Supreme Court that it does not, she intends to do what this site called on her to do a year and a half ago – conduct the next general election (now due in late 2024) as a plebiscite.

We’re not sure what the point of frittering away five years by waiting was.

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We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.

The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.

So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.

I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.

My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.

Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.

Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.

When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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Wings has been informed this morning by a reliable source that Police Scotland have now progressed their inquiry into the SNP’s “missing” £600,000 fundraiser money from an “assessment” to a formal criminal investigation into the matter, which was first revealed on this site in January 2020. We understand that an official statement to that effect will be forthcoming shortly.

[EDIT 12.27pm: the statement is below.]

”Police Scotland has now received seven complaints in relation to donations that were made to the Scottish National Party.

“After assessment and consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we will now carry out an investigation.

“Enquiries are continuing and anyone who has any information which may assist with this investigation is asked to contact police.”

We look forward to the eventual outcome and continue our retirement in the meantime. Those still loyal to the party leadership wishing to be reassured that everything is fine and above board and the whole thing is a mad conspiracy theory and a total non-story are directed to Wee Ginger Dug and to the Twitter accounts of Pete Wishart, Mhairi Hunter, Tom Arthur, Stewart McDonald, Tom Gordon and David Leask, as usual.

Wings Over Scotland pageviews, March 2020-Feb 2021.

No wonder only dogs can hear Pete Wishart’s screeching now.

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It’s the second sunny day in Bath since last September, readers, so we’re going to go out and feed the wildlife, but we thought you’d enjoy a quick roundup of some of the distractions the Sturgeonite elements of the Scottish media are punting today in a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the devastating contents of Alex Salmond’s epic evidence session at the Fabiani inquiry on Friday.

We’ll make this quick.

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It’s difficult to know where to even start on the absolutely extraordinary reaction to our post about yesterday’s meeting of the SNP National Executive Committee. Our traffic exploded to levels not seen since 2014, racking up tens of thousands of pageviews an hour, and social media was aflame with argument into the small hours of the morning.

A whole raft of issues arose from our exclusive revelations, but the one we want to talk about now is the one that was buried at the bottom of what a panicked SNP hastily and laughably produced as the “minutes” of the meeting, and we didn’t even notice it until a couple of hours after the original post.

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In a surprise development, we made Pete Wishart happy today.

And not just him.

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