“Herald View”, the Sunday Herald, 12 Jan 2014:
However, they cannot secure these protections under the current constitutional arrangements.”
This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.
It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.
Yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday took a slightly strange angle on the results of a social-attitudes survey conducted by the thinktank “British Future” last month.
…or put another way, MORE than half of them DON’T believe that. But anyway.
Now here’s an explosive thing to drop at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night.
Click the image to read the full Financial Times story. Did the game just change?
It’s a fortunate thing, viewers, that we have a strong will, hardened by years of dreich, endless 1970s Sundays in Scotland with only three channels on the telly (each of them showing programmes entirely about farming and God), everything outside shut except the rainclouds, and nothing to look forward to but school in the morning.
Because otherwise the frustrations of yesterday’s site problems, followed by waking up this morning to be faced with papers stuffed to the brim with miserable, bleating old Scottish Labour dinosaurs with torn coupons and long catalogues of whinges about you-know-who and you-know-what might just have pushed us over the edge.
Hello again! We apologise for the recent 19-hour interruption to normal Wings Over Scotland service, which was almost certainly the result of a cyber-attack by the KGB.
Not really, of course. A combination of a badly-coded plugin, human error and the global curse of spam comments is most likely what actually took us offline for most of yesterday and this morning. But in the light of today’s Sunday Herald front-page scoop, it’s hard to be absolutely sure.
Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.
The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.
…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.
“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)
So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
