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Wings Over Scotland


Outside the triangle 167

Posted on February 11, 2015 by

We figured you’d probably want to see this.

(Skip to 3.00 to get past the pointless title frame. Text of speech here.)

The Great Narrowing 224

Posted on February 11, 2015 by

Independent website Political Compass has just released its 2015 graph charting the ideological positions of all the political parties of the UK. It’s a fairly predictable one.

pc2015

On the image above, we’ve added, for parties active in Scotland only, striped circles indicating each party’s 2010 position. But what does it tell us about 2015?

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Biting bullets and chewing carpets 232

Posted on February 10, 2015 by

It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

labourhame1pound

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

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A sudden change of fortune 88

Posted on February 10, 2015 by

The Telegraph, 13 September 2014:

Scotland heading for a ‘Great Depression’ after a Yes vote

A study by Deutsche Bank said a Yes vote for Scottish independence would ‘go down in history as a political and economic mistake’ on a par with Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failures by the Federal Reserve in America that triggered the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It warned that Scotland risked a similar depression if voters backed the Yes campaign on Thursday, and described the desire for independence as an ‘incomprehensible’ one which could have negative consequences ‘far beyond’ what people had imagined.

Gordon Brown said the Deutsche Bank report showed that Scotland was ‘in danger of falling through an economic trapdoor’.”

We can only assume something pretty amazing must have happened since then.

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Winning ticket remains unclaimed 80

Posted on February 10, 2015 by

A number of readers last night sent us copies of the response to complaints they’d made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the Daily Record’s infamous “The Vow” front cover. We attach the full judgement at the bottom of this article, and as far as we’re concerned it’s fair and accurate. The Vow was a deliberate deception, but it didn’t break any rules – it merely relied on readers misinterpreting it.

vowipso

The bit we’re still interested in is the paragraph above.

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Questions To Which The Answer Is No 97

Posted on February 09, 2015 by

We know we were all traumatised at the time, but how on Earth did we miss this?

rogiepoll

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Last on the bandwagon 151

Posted on February 09, 2015 by

It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.

The article concluded with some comments from Labour.

“It was reported last month that Labour will include a commitment in its general election manifesto to ensure major sporting such as the Open Championship are shown on terrestrial TV.

Scottish leader Jim Murphy told the Scotland and Sunday events like the Open and international football “shouldn’t be a minority sport for only those who can afford satellite television subscriptions”.

A party spokesman said today: “We’re happy to send the SNP Government links to all the announcements Jim Murphy and Kez Dugdale have made so that it is easier for them to adopt our policies.”

Which is, y’know, bold.

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The other kind of money 259

Posted on February 08, 2015 by

Still confused about the difference between an “oil fund” and a “resilience fund”, folks?

bailliefund1

So were we, but no longer. We’ve had a breakthrough.

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Fetch more hammers 146

Posted on February 08, 2015 by

Posted this morning, after a week in which it was so comprehensively proven to be a complete lie that even Torcuil Crichton of the Daily Record was forced to concede it.

labourlie

You almost have to grudgingly admire the sheer bull-headed tenacity of their dogged determination to prove once and for all to the people of Scotland that Labour think they’re dribbling gullible morons.

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Soapbox: Happy hours 371

Posted on February 07, 2015 by

So, an experiment. Here on Wings we don’t tend to deal very much in specific political issues, other than independence. We’re not aligned to any party, and our primary goal is to see Scotland become a national democracy in which all voices can be heard. We happen to be on the left of the political spectrum, but that’s neither here nor there while Scotland’s politics are at the mercy of the whims of voters elsewhere.

But just for a change of pace at the weekends, when there tends not to be much happening, we thought we might try having a space where broader ideas can be debated outwith the framework of the constitutional debate or party politics. If there’s something you’d like to talk about in front of a sizeable audience, drop us a line.

soapbox1

To give you an idea of what we mean, we’re going to start off by outlining a personal pet idea we’ve had for years, and which is an attempt to tackle one of Scotland’s most toxic problems – alcohol abuse. It’s a simple concept, it’s cheap to implement, it doesn’t punish the innocent and it seems like it’d work. See what you think.

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The last of the monkeys 100

Posted on February 07, 2015 by

badlands

The enemy of their enemy 243

Posted on February 06, 2015 by

A quick rhetorical question, readers: if, as Labour endlessly claim, the Tories want the SNP to win seats in Scotland in order to stop Ed Miliband being PM, why are most of the Scottish columnists in the right-wing press calling on Scots to vote Labour?

tactical

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