This is such a strange story.
Because even although it’s part of a transparent attempt from the Record to deflect attention from the many shocking revelations of the last few days around the Salmond affair, it’s still unusual that a newspaper would make a front-page lead out of a claim it knows it can’t provide a single scrap of evidence for.
We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.
It was quite the performance.
A column on a Sturgeon-loyalist indy website that we read yesterday has been mildly annoying us ever since, and in the interests of open debate (but mainly because it’s cold and grey and rainy outside and we can’t go out and feed the swans) we thought it was worth taking half an hour to walk through it a little and explain just why it’s such a dangerous piece of fantasy nonsense.
But first here’s one of said swans. She’s about five months old and her adult feathers are just starting to come through. Isn’t she lovely?
In case things get a bit rough later we’ve got some squirrels and a really fat dachshund as emergency backup, so buckle in.
We’re so far beyond mere “scraping the barrel” now.
Unhappy with polls based on asking the simple and clear question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”, and which have been stubbornly refusing to show any movement against independence, our dear old pals at Scotland In Union recently commissioned one of their own seeking to muddy the waters.
Their brainwave was to try to confuse respondents by tangling up the usual indyref responses (firmly and consistently set in people’s minds over the last seven years as “Yes” and “No”) with the responses associated with the EU referendum (“Remain” and “Leave”), in the hope that Scots – who of course are heavily in favour of Remain – would be fooled and/or brainwashed into saying something different.
And it very very slightly worked, right up to the point where it fell apart.
“…but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.”
Labour have now been promising to abolish the Lords for around 110 years, including 37 years as the UK government. But wait! They’ve got more promises for you!
We hadn’t been intending to talk about this again today, but the John Beattie show on Radio Scotland just ran a segment that we really can’t let go unremarked.
Here’s the whole thing. Some of that’s going to need interpreting for the sane.
A couple of months earlier than we were expecting it, we’ve had the Sheriff’s decision on our court hearing a month ago against Kezia Dugdale.
tl;dr version: we won.
Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.
And it didn’t even go down fighting.
…is all you have to put up with before we stop nagging you for cash again for another year. The 2018 Wings fundraiser ends tomorrow morning, so this is your last chance to put a little of your money where our mouth is.
(Fundraiser page here, or click here to donate directly.)The current total stands at a phenomenal £128,600 – already the second-highest ever by a five-figure margin, and just £11,447 short of the all-time record.
So one last time, we’re going to remind you:
– the average Wings reader gives the BBC £72 a year, and Wings just 43p.
– the Unionist “grassroots” organisations who we also have to fight are funded by Lords, Dukes, Earls, Countesses, Sirs and billionaires.
– we use your money to produce stuff that actually makes a difference, rather than just lecturing an internet audience that already agrees with us.
– we’re the only pro-indy site the Unionist/media establishment fears enough to constantly attack, smear and try to silence.
If any of that is worth anything to you, now’s the time to show it, folks.
There’s so little happening in Scottish politics news today that we had to read David Torrance’s column in the Herald, and we must say we ended up pretty confused.
Not by the fact that it was a free half-page advert for a new Unionist “thinktank” set up by an angry unsuccessful dogfood salesman readers may be familiar with – there were no surprises to be found there from either Torrance or the Herald – but by the thinktank itself, which doesn’t seem to know its Arsenal from its Devil’s Elbow.
When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.
Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
