Poor old Tommy Sheppard’s got a contract, so he has to keep talking. And this week he said something that, if anyone really thought the constitution was still a current live political issue, would have attracted a lot more attention than it did.
Because even the SNP are now saying another indyref is – at best – a decade away.
We were very pleased to discover this morning that Johnny Ball is still alive.
But even the man who managed to make maths fun for generations of children would be hard pushed to make sense of the SNP’s membership figures.
In these grim times, at least we have funny animal videos to cheer us up.
Unfortunately when you write about politics for a living, everything is an analogy.
These paragraphs are all from the same story.
The Hate Crime Act has rather faded into obscurity after the furore surrounding its introduction, with the police apparently just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist by ignoring thousands and thousands of complaints, and the useless Scottish commentariat duly proclaiming as a result that it was all just a big fuss about nothing.
But as soon as everyone stopped looking at it, there it was.
In many ways, the fabricated, hysterical furore of Humza Yousaf Vs Elon Musk is the ultimate in summer-silly-season politics stories.
Absurdly plainly, the former First Minister ISN’T going to take any legal action against the billionaire owner of Twitter. He only likes bullying small nurseries, and even then he doesn’t follow through. He didn’t even sue us for calling him racist a few months ago, so there’s zero chance he’s going to square up to the world’s richest man.
Exactly a decade ago today, on 11 August 2014, the Wee Blue Book was released.
This was where things stood at that moment in time.
One month after the WBB, that 20-point gap was down, like-for-like, to two points.
As any moderately heavy internet user will tell you, it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have literally hundreds of browser tabs open at any one time.
Every now and again you’ll go to clean them up and find something that you’ve been meaning to write about in a quiet moment, and this certainly counts as a quiet moment in Scottish politics, so let’s do this one now.
Because the story above is from March, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone anywhere talk about just how weird it is, or what it tells us about the 2024 SNP.
The prolific American sci-fi writer LE Modesitt once said, “Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.”
And the powers of tools lie in the hands of those who wield them.
(And Get Away With It)
You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.
Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!
We’ve been off for a little break in the country, and as far as we can tell we’ve missed absolutely nothing in the moribund world of Scottish politics. We did, however, arrive back just in time for something mildly interesting, or at least revealing.
It’s the latest episode of a new podcast by veteran Scottish political journalist and broadcaster Bernard Ponsonby and jobbing opinion columnist Alex Massie, inventively titled The Ponsonby And Massie Podcast.
The first 35 minutes or so weren’t very noteworthy, other than the curious omission – when predicting the makeup of the next Scottish Government – of the idea of a Labour-SNP coalition, which to this site remains by far the most practical and logical outcome of the 2026 Holyrood election.
But then things got a little feisty.
So Andy Wightman just won’t stop lying.
As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Wings has made NO comments about the “workplace harassment” allegations made against Alex Salmond several years ago. We’ve only commented on the CRIMINAL allegations, and workplace harassment isn’t a crime. (It’s a matter for an employment tribunal, not the police.)
But the real question is WHY Andy Wightman is so doggedly attached to these two complainers that he’s determined to keep digging himself further into a hole of lies. And everyone knows what you tend to find when you start digging holes.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
