Wings Over Scotland

Readers probably won’t be astonished to learn that we’ve still heard nothing from anyone in Scottish Labour in response to our six simple questions about their “Devo Nano” proposals. We’ve waited three full days now and haven’t had so much as an acknowledgement of receipt or a reply to any of our tweets, so it seems safe to say we’re not going to get one.

So now it’s up to you.

Read the rest of this entry →

We were a little perplexed this morning by the Daily Record’s banner headline.

And not just because of the unusually generous use by the Labour-supporting paper of the term “SNP Government” (rather than “Scottish Goverment”) on a good-news story.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Daily Mail is proving an even more consistent source of comedy than usual of late, nowhere more so than its superb “Cybernat Watch” column (which we were delighted to find ourselves in this morning, on only its second day). Today the collection of partial, out-of-context quotes from random tweets was nestled into a bizarre piece about Labour’s shadow something, Jim Murphy.

As with most articles from the Mail’s Scottish edition it isn’t available online, but we’ve attached the text below so you can digest the full disturbing madness.

Read the rest of this entry →

We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.

So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.

And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.

Read the rest of this entry →

Okay, let’s neck another load of Red Bull and Pro-Plus and get on with this thing. How many more months can there be, anyway? (This post preceded by: January, February, March, April, May, June, July and August.)

“Mr Salmond and his empty brains has not spoken about Spain again but I went over to Spain last year and the fact is now there is more unemployment, begging and everything over there and the pensioners can’t get a pension until they retire and if you retire before you’re 80 you won’t get a pension. So I hope that we work together as a Great Britain. Thank you.” – an attendee at the launch of Better Together Glasgow.

That positive case for the Union is clearly getting through, then.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Herald’s lead story this morning is a fascinating piece from the always-interesting Gerry Braiden. Under the headline “MSP poll plan may backfire”, it reveals:

“Labour’s new selection process for the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections is expected to see high-profile casualties, the return of anonymous MSPs, and bitter infighting among potential candidates.

The party will choose ­candidates it hopes will topple the SNP Government next time around in January, a full two-and-a-half years before the poll.”

It goes on to focus on the local tribal aspects of the decision, and the likelihood that it will strengthen the grip on their seats of some of the party’s “most inconspicuous elected representatives” (Braiden singles out Glasgow list MSPs Anne McTaggart and Hanzala Malik), but uncharacteristically misses what seems to us to be by far the most intriguing consequence of the move.

To find out what that is, we need to go back to a time and place in which many Glasgow Labour politicians will feel very much at home – 1940s Soviet Russia.

Read the rest of this entry →

So, we suppose we have to point out the obvious.

The conduct and result of a Holyrood by-election isn’t strictly within this site’s remit, but the astonishing audacity with which Labour are prepared to flat-out lie to the Scottish public is, because it reflects on everything they say about independence.

So let’s step through the breathtaking piece of literature above.

Read the rest of this entry →

Those clued-up, cutting-edge sorts among you who follow our Twitter account will have seen this last night, but it definitely needs to reach a bigger audience.

It’s a recording of a meeting held by Clydebank TUC earlier this month on the subject of whether the working class should support independence. The working class is the sector of the Scottish public whose voice is least heard in the debate (which is largely dominated by middle-class media-intellectual sorts), and perhaps not coincidentally is the demographic which tends to favour independence most strongly.

The footage is raw and often angry, and readers sensitive to adult language might wish to steer clear. Anas Sarwar probably wishes he’d done the same.

Read the rest of this entry →

We already knew that Jackie Baillie had a somewhat shaky grasp of chronology. Last week she told Newsnight Scotland that to find some of the £50m required for Scotland to subsidise the UK government’s bedroom tax, she’d magically travel into the past and un-spend £7m (or as she put it, £10m) of tourism investment that’s likely to bring 20 times that much into the Scottish economy.

And on today’s Good Morning Scotland, she had another balletic prance around in the timestream, speaking from the present about how the past was the future.

Read the rest of this entry →

Because everybody loves a good transcript, right?

Read the rest of this entry →

Sometimes there isn’t much happening in the world of politics, but it’d be a bit of a stretch to describe this week as one of those times. So we’re not sure in what context this article on the BBC website today counts as “news”.

Read the rest of this entry →