Wings Over Scotland

The first novel I remember reading is “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, shortly after it came out in 1979. I was 12, and it had a huge and lasting effect on me – it was the first thing that made me want to be a writer, and both Adams’ writing style and the worldview it deftly illustrated have been lifelong influences.

Almost every line in the book is great, but this one always stuck with me:

And so to the last of the results from our current poll.

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In normal times we’d at least find today’s landmark defeat of the UK government in a Scottish court amusing. But these are not normal times, and at the present moment our toxic loathing of every politician in Westminster makes it a bitter fruit.

Although we must admit this bit still did manage to raise a smile:

(The reason, incidentally, is that the English High Court wasn’t sitting in August.)

What does it all actually mean, though? Well, nothing good.

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On Saturday, for the second year in a row, there was a huge and joyous independence march through the centre of Glasgow, which passed off with no incidents, arrests or disturbances despite attempted provocation from a small handful of abusive Unionist bigots led by a Holocaust denier.

Most of the Sunday papers carried largely neutral and factual reports of the event, of varying quality and size, with only a comical piece of hysteria in the extremist Scottish Daily Express standing out as objectionable for its ridiculous headline (and even then the actual copy barely mentioned the march at all).

But also for the second year in a row, one paper – or to be more specific, one man – took a rather more negative slant.

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Dear Mr. Trump,

I’m a big fan of your work.

Especially your later stuff. You are the obvious natural successor to those other great leaders, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush – the perfect combination of dodgy and thick. You’ve got it all.

Since the first day of your tangeroid slithering into Barack’s old gaff, you’ve gone from strength to strength. I thought building a thousand mile wall to stop people escaping would be your greatest triumph. But putting kids in cages? Genius.

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Alert readers will have noted that last night we took down our story about Scotland In Union‘s spreadsheet of all the various super-wealthy Dukes, Duchesses, Viscounts, Earls, Marquesses, Countesses, Sirs, Lords, Ladies, Colonels and Brigadiers who fund their “grassroots” anti-independence operation. (AGM pictured below.)

We believe we’re entitled under the law to run the article, and hope to have it back up soon, but frankly we don’t even want to think about the cost of calling a top media lawyer on a Sunday that’s also Hogmanay, so that might have to wait a day or two.

And anyway, it’s not even nearly the most interesting aspect of the affair.

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Scotland has 2,174 miles of trunk roads, of which 1.7 miles (that’s just under 0.08%) comprise the Queensferry Crossing. For the next few days those 1.7 miles are going to be subject to some partial lane closures on the southbound side for maintenance.

They’ll cause almost no disruption, because as it happens there’s another very similar bridge conveniently located just a couple of hundred yards away – linked directly to all the same roads – that traffic will use instead.

Not much of a story, is it? We don’t know how many miles of Scotland’s roads have roadworks on them on any given day of any given week, but we suspect it’s quite a lot. It tends not to make the news beyond a few seconds on the traffic bulletin at the end, but today was different.

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We struggled to summon up much more than a weary sigh about a story in a couple of the minor papers today (the Herald and Express), about a micro-scuffle at Saturday’s pro-indy rally in Glasgow. The most interesting thing about it appeared to be that the Express had written its article several hours before the event took place.

But we weren’t quite right.

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We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Earlier this morning an alert reader directed us to an article in the Daily Express which seemed to make an eye-catchingly remarkable claim. It turned out to be one actually made by Ruth Davidson on Saturday (which had already been reported in the Express that day), when she appeared on Iain Dale’s radio show on LBC.

A 27% swing? From the SNP to the Tories? Putting the Tories AHEAD in the polls? That would be such a stupendously Earth-shattering development in Scottish politics that you’d think the media would have made more of it than a couple of mentions in an embarrassing low-circulation comic like the Express.

So we thought we’d better check.

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It’s important to note, firstly, that the version of Sadiq Khan’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference he tweeted on Saturday morning simply flat-out said that Scottish nationalists were the same as racists and sectarian bigots. Its meaning was as clear as crystal to the Daily Record, a newspaper which is hardly hostile to Khan’s party.

“No difference” is a stark and unambiguous phrase. The speech did not contain the hastily-added qualifiers about “in this respect” and “of course I’m not saying the SNP are racist” which suddenly appeared when he read it out onstage that afternoon.

But which version did he really mean?

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Saturday 11.34am:

Saturday 8.02pm:

Wow, that’s fast. We can only assume she took John McTernan with her.

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Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen had a quite extraordinary meltdown on Twitter last night and this morning after we highlighted an appalling article that she’d written for Saturday’s paper.

After angrily attacking other users for a few hours, by the end she’d declared a full-on DefCon One, sending out a desperate plea for hauners from entities as diverse as the Times, the New York Times, the Telegraph, the NUJ, the Washington Post, Guardian Scotland, BBC Radio 4, the Drudge Report, the CEO of Twitter and JK Rowling.

At the time of writing, none had replied.

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