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Wings Over Scotland


21 days later 77

Posted on October 08, 2023 by

A page 2 SUNDAY MAIL EXCLUSIVE from Hannah “Trannah” Rodger today:

Or if you’re a Wings follower, last month’s news.

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The Day Of The Jackals 268

Posted on October 07, 2023 by

The parasite infestation within the SNP has sensed its moment has arrived.

The final act of hostile takeover is almost upon us.

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The Surge 124

Posted on October 06, 2023 by

Labour won far more handsomely in last night’s by-election than anyone – and we very strongly suspect that includes themselves – expected. If the swing of over 20% was to be repeated nationwide next year (which it won’t be, but we’ll get to that in a minute), the SNP would be reduced to six or seven seats, as Wings has predicted for a while.

From the abject pit of despair of 2015, when Labour lost 40 of its 41 MPs in Scotland, let’s look at how the party has powered back to recapture the hearts of voters.

Wait, what?

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Getting left behind 96

Posted on October 06, 2023 by

Humza Yousaf didn’t turn up to the count tonight. In the end, even on a dreadfully low turnout of 37%, Labour won by 9,446 votes, with more than twice as many as the SNP.

It was a much worse defeat for the governing party than most expected. There should be only one outcome.

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The Gathering Storm 116

Posted on October 05, 2023 by

After months of phony war, we’re actually about to find out something concrete about the current state of Scottish politics.

The omens aren’t massively auspicious.

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Going on a journey 116

Posted on October 04, 2023 by

Or not, as the case may be.

All aboard!

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The Winter Of Independence 75

Posted on October 03, 2023 by

Following on from that unforgettable summer:

We’re sure that, like us, you can hardly wait.

From the archives #16 132

Posted on October 02, 2023 by

Someone tweeted this today:

We were curious to find out what we’d said, but it seems to have been expunged from The National’s website. We eventually managed to track the email down in our vaults, though, so just as a bit of a change, here it is, as a reminder of a different time.

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Not long now! 89

Posted on October 01, 2023 by

Get your coat, it’s nearly time.

The Widowmaker 160

Posted on September 30, 2023 by

The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.

The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.

The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.

But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.

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The Speccy Arcade 100 (2023 Edition) 1

Posted on September 27, 2023 by

It’s been almost two years since I wrote the totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100 – also compiled and written by me – was published in 1991.

Obviously stuff has continued to happen on the Speccy scene since then, so it’s now, in some senses, not quite so definitive. Or at least it wasn’t, until I updated it, which I’ve just done, so now it is again. Of it. Or something.

(I appear to have a debilitating compulsion to write top 100s for no very good reason. There’s also this one, and I’m currently working on yet another as a distraction from the wretched state of politics, so fans of subjectively-numbered lists of extremely old videogames should definitely stay tuned.)

I also wanted to have it all in one post rather than five, so now if you want to see the videos of the original arcade games you’ll have to click the titles of each entry – only the Speccy videos are embedded within the article, so the page SHOULD now actually load up without falling over.

There are loads of new entries, a few position adjustments – don’t get TOO excited, Bomb Jack fans – and a bit of general tidying, but I haven’t rewritten the entire thing because it’s 33,000 words and I’m not a lunatic, although those two facts are mostly unrelated. So if you haven’t seen it before, go and get a cup of tea and some biscuits, because this might take a while.

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Birth Of A Politician 463

Posted on September 26, 2023 by

You can’t do this, you know. You just can’t.

These things cannot both be true.

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