Wings Over Scotland

So this is pretty embarrassing.

The Scottish National Party’s primary and defining purpose is Scottish independence. Next weekend’s “special conference” will at least notionally determine its policy on that subject for years to come. On the face of it it’s the most important congregation of party members in the SNP’s history.

The Caird Hall can accommodate just 3% of the claimed membership. (And you’d expect at least half the seats to have been reserved in advance for the faithful payroll.) Members ought to be fighting like dogs for a ticket. And yet a week before the event the leader is having to send out pleading letters to try to scare up enough attendees that it won’t be a half-empty humiliation.

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Some of you still won’t have seen them, er, we mean “this”:

While it may have been the funniest – and Joanna Cherry silently spoke for every sane person in the nation as it went on – remarkably it wasn’t even the stupidest or most offensive part of her speech to yesterday’s Parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall about the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act.

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Nicola Sturgeon has not been charged with any crime. Yesterday she was arrested, questioned and released without charge pending further investigation. We do not even know which specific suspected crime or crimes she was questioned in connection with, so it is manifestly impossible to meaningfully speculate on her innocence or guilt (save of course for the fact that all are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven otherwise, something Sturgeon herself often appears to forget).

Nevertheless, in Scotland the Contempt Of Court Act 1981 applies from the moment a person is arrested, as the country’s most senior lawyer and its official prosecution service were both keen to remind people yesterday in the clearest possible terms, and it applies equally whether you’re asserting someone’s guilt or their innocence.

So you need to be a really extra-special class of boneheaded numbwit to do this:

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Your first question, Ian Murray: who is the First Minister and leader of the SNP?

Ooh, sorry, zero points.

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Welcome to Cell Club, Nicola.

Wings two days ago: “The SNP wants to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.

The SNP today: “We’re prepared to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.

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Is pictured below.

We’re putting it here for the record.

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Let’s start with what we know.

The SNP tell us that independence support is currently at 53%.

They tell us that most Scots want a referendum within the next year:

And we know that it’s absolutely unequivocally possible for the SNP and Greens to trigger a Holyrood election which would serve as a de facto referendum not only within a year, but within weeks. Scots could entirely realistically go to the polls this August or September, or even on the date Nicola Sturgeon promised less than a year ago.

So why are the SNP choosing this of all moments to give up?

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In fairness, on one level it’s really funny.

Assuming you’ve already resigned yourself to independence never happening, that is.

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Even for Lorna Slater this is jaw-droppingly dumb:

It takes Olympic-class stupidity to publicly put a figure to how much your staggering incompetence has cost Scottish businesses in the middle of an economic crisis.

Either the Scottish Government knew the DRS wasn’t compliant and was hoping the UK government would shut it down, so that it could attempt to clumsily extract some political capital from “interference” (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds), OR it was so mindbogglingly inept that it genuinely intended the scheme to go into operation but failed to legislate it properly (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds).

In either case, any minister with responsibility for the gargantuan shambles should – quite obviously – be out on their ears before FMQs on Thursday in desperate hope of avoiding the government being sued by the affected firms. But the SNP/Green coalition has as little shame as it has ability or dignity, so expect the clown show to continue.

The 16K ZX Spectrum was definitely the ginger stepchild of the family of micros that defined home computing in the UK in the 1980s. With far less memory available to coders (just 9K) than a 16K ZX81, the £125 cost of the entry-level model – shockingly the equivalent of £416 now – didn’t get you all that much bang for your buck when it launched, even by the standards of April 1982.

The vast majority of purchasers wisely chose to save up the extra £50 for the 48K version (£175, or a hefty £582 in 2023 money, although still peanuts compared to the Commodore 64’s launch price of £1,327 equivalent), and the 16K Speccy very quickly fell out of favour. In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.

(There are no official figures for how many of the 5 million Spectrums sold were 16Ks, but Home Computing Weekly reported in May 1983 that 300,000 machines in total were sold in the first year, and in August 1983 Popular Computing Weekly reported that the 48K had outsold the 16K by two to one, so we can make a reasonable guess at somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 units of the 16K in the year and a bit it was on sale, or roughly 3% of all Spectrums.)

But even in its very brief life (the vast bulk of these titles were released in 1983), the 16K machine amassed a library of fun games that left the catalogues of many better-specced computers in the dust. And for no particular reason other than that 40 years have passed since it abruptly met its fate, we’re here to celebrate them.

So sit yourself down with one of the last cans of Lilt (or don’t, because it’s full of poisonous artificial-sweetener chemicals now), get ready to fondly remember a few old favourites, and hopefully also discover some lost gems for the first time.

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