Wings Over Scotland

We’ll be brief about the Eastleigh by-election result.

For all sorts of reasons.

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Look, you knew we’d have to do this. Today’s ruling of the commission investigating SFA/SPL rule breaches by Rangers is almost the closing act in the farcical saga that’s enveloped Scottish football for just over a year since the club went into administration on Valentine’s Day 2012, so we’re nearly finished now.

Nevertheless, Lord Nimmo-Smith’s judgement is so extraordinary and bizarre it simply can’t pass without comment. We gave a gut reaction to it this morning, but it’s in the detail that you really see the contortions into which the Commission was obliged to twist itself in order to let the club off scot-free.

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NOTICE: We’ll be doing a bit of an internet flit this evening – any comments posted from 12 midnight to around 6am may find themselves going astray in the process. Everything should be better than normal by the morning. As you were.

(I've been meaning to write this piece for months, but – not entirely unrelatedly – have been rather neglecting WoSland in favour of another site whose readers ARE in fact prepared to pay a very modest price for journalism. But what the heck, let's do it now.)

Today has seen the much-trailed worldwide release of Real Racing 3 for the iOS platforms. The controversial "free-to-play" game has a horrendous IAP structure which forces players to have to either wait for hours and hours (and hours) at paywalls between sessions or cough up a mindboggling fortune to play it continuously.

This, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

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If you’re a banker in a small country and you criminally destroy the entire national economy out of personal and corporate greed, you go to jail.

If you’re a banker in a large country and you criminally destroy the entire national economy out of personal and corporate greed, a laughably small fine is imposed and you get to keep everything your fraudulent actions helped you line your pockets with.

If you’re a small Scottish football club and you field an improperly-registered player once, by accident, you forfeit the match and are disqualified from the tournament.

If you’re a large Scottish football club and you field numerous improperly-registered players, repeatedly and deliberately, to gain an unfair advantage, a laughably small fine (which will never be paid) is imposed on a completely different and bankrupt company, and you get to keep everything the unregistered players in question helped you win.

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There’s an interesting story on the BBC website this morning on the subject of EU membershi- WAIT! COME BACK! Honestly, it really IS quite interesting!

The UK state broadcaster’s Scottish outpost has undertaken what could under certain conditions be described as journalism, by conducting a survey of 27 EU member states (plus imminent newcomer Croatia) to find out their view of what an independent Scotland’s status would be. 23 of the 28 either ignored the Beeb’s request or wouldn’t commit to an opinion, but the teeny Baltic state of Latvia (pop. 2.2m, EU member since 2004) pluckily threw its 2-Lats-worth into the debate.

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Better Together leaked posters #11: a special message from Ian Davidson.

(Mole at BT HQ: "Free Scotland".)

In political terms, being an MP is a bit of a poisoned chalice of a job. You ostensibly get elected to represent your constituents, but in reality to represent your party leader. Unless you manage to land yourself a ministerial job you’re basically nothing but a vote on legs, told what to say and ordered through the division lobby by party whips like a ewe in a sheepdog trial, under the constant threat of being overlooked for plum spots on committees or even deselected.

Now don’t worry, readers. Wings Over Scotland isn’t going soft. We have precious little sympathy to spare for career politicians troughing for all they’re worth on a £65,000 salary typically inflated to somewhere comfortably over £100,000 by allowances and perks, and accompanied by incredibly generous redundancy payments and pensions the likes of which us poor saps can only dream of.

But still, it’s no job for anyone with any dignity or self-respect. MPs are loathed by the public more than almost any other profession (other than bankers, with whom most people think they rhyme), very often justifiably so, and most will achieve nothing in their lives other than self-enrichment. It’s a soul-destroying way to get yourself a couple of nice houses at the taxpayer’s expense.

There’s a much less corrosive way to be an MP, though.

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It’s old news, but someone finally dug up the actual leaflet. Click for the reason!

If the YesScotland campaign had its wits about it, it’d be running off a million of these with this week’s news stories printed in bold on the back.

We apologise to all readers for the extra-flaky performance of the site today. The ridiculously, needlessly convoluted process of moving domain should be complete by tomorrow, and we should be in maximum effect at our brand-new, altogether-more-robust location by Friday. And we thank, once again, everyone who contributed to the donations that made that move possible.

We’ve already asked this question on Twitter (no answers yet), but we should open it up here too. In the light of today’s piece by Stewart Bremner, we’ve been racking our brains trying to think if anyone has moved, in public, from being a Yes vote to a No – or even a Don’t Know – since, let’s say, the SNP’s victory in 2007, the point at which a referendum started to become a real possibility rather than just an abstract concept.

That’s almost six years ago now. Surely SOMEONE must have been won over by the Unionists’ arguments or by the slick, positive, coherent “Better Together” campaign? There’s no shortage of testimonies from people moving, or at least edging, the other way. Even the Sunday Mail is starting to waver a little, for Heaven’s sake.

But we haven’t heard of a single, solitary human in all those six years of intensified constitutional debate who’d previously supported independence having announced to the world that it’s a bad idea and we’re better off in the bosom of Mother UK after all.

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For a long time if felt like a dirty secret. It’s how we’ve been conditioned. It was simply something that you just didn’t speak about, because most people around you would look down on you if they knew.

Those feelings are something that many who believe in an independent Scotland have encountered at some point in our lives. Up until recently I very much felt that way, and to this day I’m still wary of mentioning my Scottish independence yearning in some circles. But times are changing.

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