Wings Over Scotland

It’s funny, but even when you think about politics all day for a living, there are some thoughts that just never pop into your head, and then someone says them a decade later and you think “Oh yeah, of course, it’s obvious”.

Iain Macwhirter is almost certainly right about that in today’s Times. We all focus on how it would have saved Scotland from Brexit, which of course it would, but the truth is that it would have saved the rest of the country too, because the shock would have been so seismic that politicians would have been terrified to put power in the hands of the people again for many, many years.

And of course maybe you love Brexit, or maybe you just think it would have been wrong for the rest of the country to have been denied a vote on it, or maybe you think Nigel Farage would have stormed to victory and become Prime Minister as a result or something. But those are all separate arguments. What’s beyond any reasonable doubt is that for good or ill, that’s how it would have panned out.

So as time goes on, remember who’s responsible not just for Scotland still being in the UK, but also for the UK being out of Europe and for Nicola Sturgeon having been First Minister for the last eight years and our country being run into the ground by a bunch of crooked, hapless, gender-obsessed imbeciles.

Thanks again, No voters. Great victory you won there.

This is officially the most embarrassed to be Scottish we’ve ever been.

And we’re including both the 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony AND the time Craig Levein played 4-6-0 against the Czech Republic in that.

We have a government of clowns. Please, somebody, make it stop.

While we’re not talking about politics, here’s something else. I’ve just returned from Bath’s fine Royal United Hospital, where I’ve been getting a test done. (So as to avoid unnecessary dramatic tension, as far as anyone knows everything’s fine.)

A while ago I was having some intermittent but rather alarming trouble with swallowing – behave yourselves at the back, there – as well as a bit of general alimentary-canal oddness and mild discomfort, and went to see my doctor. She thought it was probably acid reflux and gave me omeprazole (which fixed the swallowing thing straight away), but just for safety also scheduled me for a barium scan at the hospital.

I’m a bit of a Nervous Nelly when it comes to any sort of medical procedure – this was my first time in a hospital on my own account – and went Googling to see what to expect. I found about 14 different leaflets from various NHS trusts, no two of which said the same thing, which wasn’t exactly reassuring.

What I wanted was a first-hand account or two from actual people who’d had it done, and rather to my surprise I couldn’t find any anywhere on the internet. So since I have a moderately widely-read website, I’m going to write one here for the benefit of not only Wings readers, but anyone else who might find themselves searching for one.

Stand by for some HOT REPORTING. (The above is a genuine RUH sign.)

Read the rest of this entry →

Zilch continues to happen in Scottish politics, so to pass a bleak November afternoon we’re going to do something we haven’t done on Wings for years: talk about football.

Try not to panic, because it’s really about the Scottish media – just like it used to be back in the good old days when they, rather than the SNP, were the main obstacles to Scottish independence. But there’s going to be quite a bit of football involved along the way, so if you can’t bear it, just go and stare out of the window and wait for Spring.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s not just the obvious tempting-fate part.

Yousaf himself has been demonstrating his unfitness for office ever since he’s had offices. But that’s not even the dumbest thing about that tweet.

Read the rest of this entry →

Wings Over Scotland is 12 years old today. And since absolutely nothing is happening in the world of Scottish independence – and hasn’t for, frankly, years – we thought we’d take you on a trip back to the day we were born, since when things DID change.

Remember when we had a leader who could get the UK government to do stuff it didn’t want to do, readers? AND actually increase support for independence? Good times.

With the shock defection of Ash Regan from the SNP to Alba last week, followed by councillor Chris Cullen, Alex Salmond’s party now has representation at every level of Scottish politics – Westminster, Holyrood and local.

But it still awaits a mass breakthrough, either in politicians crossing the floor or in the polls. In the meantime the SNP is plunging to new lows, recording just 32% in two polls last week, one of which saw them trailing six points behind Scottish Labour.

It seems reasonable to assume that the SNP’s fall is going to continue, with lots more bad news looming in its future – Operation Branchform, the likely humiliating loss of the Section 35 challenge in the wake of Lady Dorrian’s judgement this week, the ongoing ferries and trams inquiries and now the already-damaging COVID inquiry.

The party and its media cheerleaders are pumping out increasingly desperate “please don’t leave us” messaging, ironically only drawing attention to its stricken state.

So the future of the political side of the independence movement appears to be very much up for grabs and open to debate. With that in mind, Wings sat down by Zoom with Ash Regan to quiz her about where she saw it going.

Read the rest of this entry →

We held back from writing about yesterday’s judgment from Lady Dorrian in the Court Of Session in the hope that if we stared at it for long enough we could get it to make some kind of sense. But it does not. On the face of it, the country’s second-most-senior judge is simply a drooling imbecile.

Because that submission is not the least bit difficult to follow.

Read the rest of this entry →

Maybe he thinks Ash Denham and Ash Regan are two different people.

Still, consistency, honesty, decency and integrity: no great loss.

We were interested to read about this earlier this evening:

Not least because it was the first we’d heard about it. At the time of writing this post we’ve still had no communication from the Standards Commission to alert us to the judgement, which is frankly a bit of a poor show. We might file a complaint with the Standards Commission about it, depending on whether we can be bothered to wait another year and a quarter for the result.

We are of course pleased that the odious Cllr Joji has finally been formally censured for her obnoxious behaviour, but frankly she’s gotten off very lightly.

Read the rest of this entry →

We expected nothing better from Mhairi Hunter, of course, a once-decent human being corrupted by Nicola Sturgeon into an unthinking party drone.

But the reaction of the First Minister of Scotland to Ash Regan’s defection to Alba today is a sour, ugly and childish thing that would have been unworthy of the leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, never mind a serious grown-up in a position of power.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s taken longer than we hoped and urged. But the SNP, having already lost one Parliamentarian to the Tories and kicked another one out for actually trying to achieve independence, has now lost one to a pro-indy party, with Ash Regan’s defection to Alba this afternoon.

(Which as far as we can tell is the first direct switch in Scottish Parliament history. Others have stood down to become independents, and subsequently stood for other parties, but nobody has moved straight from one party to another.)

We hope she’s only the first of many. Because the SNP is over. It has no credibility left either as a party of independence or a party of government, and anyone who stays on board the smoking wreck can have no complaints when they go down with it.