Wings Over Scotland

Tony Blair quoted in the Independent today:

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The Sunday Post’s lobby reporter James Millar noticed today that all the parties have submitted their nominations to sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster.

As has already been noted, the majority of the committee – seven from 11 – are MPs for English seats (list below). But one name in particular caught our attention.

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From an editorial in today’s Daily Record:

“The debate in the House of Commons yesterday proved once and for all that The Vow is doing its job.

David Cameron had to stick to his word under pressure from misguided backbenchers who demanded an end to the way Scotland is funded through the Barnett formula.

The Prime Minister insisted no review is ‘on the horizon’, saving valuable funds for Holyrood.”

But that isn’t a very accurate report of events, for several reasons. Not least of them is the fact that David Cameron wasn’t even there.

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By the time we’d watched the Commons debate on devolution for four and a quarter hours, precisely ONE non-Unionist MP (the SNP’s Pete Wishart) had been allowed to speak, for just six minutes. On learning there were still two more hours scheduled, we could take no more and bailed out like the Bank of England.

Clearly we weren’t the only ones.

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The tweet on the left is one of the rare appearances of Scottish Labour’s fabled “2014 Truth Team”, while over on the right is a snippet from Scottish Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale’s column in this morning’s Daily Record.

This shouldn’t take long.

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We’ve noted a few times recently that the increasingly bitter, angry and even violent tone of the “Better Together” campaign isn’t the sort of thing you’d normally expect from a movement confident and relaxed about its chances of victory.

But over the space of just the last few days – perhaps enraged by the positivity of the SNP conference – the defenders of the Union have been descending into madness even more precipitously than usual.

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“It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it.” – Terry Pratchett, author

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Wings Over Scotland is a Scottish political website, which focuses particularly on the media – whether mainstream print and broadcast organisations or the online and social-network community – as well as offering its own commentary and analysis.

“Arguably the most exciting, invigorating and innovative entrant to the Scottish media world in recent years.”
– Stephen Daisley (STV News)

“Irrevocably transformed online politics in Britain.”
– Scott Hames/Dominic Hinde (New Statesman)

“Irreverent, brave, challenging, intelligent and often brilliant analysis.”
– Colin Meek (Journalism.co.uk)

“The Mumsnet of the independence movement.”
– Ross McCafferty (Daily Record)

“A highly controversial cyber organisation.”
– Barbara Davies (Daily Mail)

“The problem voice of unthinking Scottish nationalism.”
– Gerry Hassan (Sunday Mail)

“Keeping up with the activies of the media phenomenon that is Wings Over Scotland would wear out your mouse.”
– Michael Gray (Common Space/The National)

“The hate-filled website Wings Over Scotland.”
– Emma Cowing (Daily Mail)

“A world of conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia. This is a brand of nationalism that seeks to peddle falsehoods and unfounded allegations against anyone who isn’t a believer. It is nasty, sewage politics that debases public life. And yet the Wings Over Scotland [sic] is cited as an authoritative source by some leading SNP figures who really should know better.”
– Murray Foote (Daily Record)

“The nastiest hate blog in the UK.”
– Muriel Gray (broadcaster and former independence supporter)

“Journalists don’t like Wings much, but the simple fact is that if you’re looking for forensic analysis then you’re much more likely to find it at Wings than in the pages of much of the papers.”
– Eric Joyce (former Labour MP)

“A new and awful low in Scottish politics.”
– Margaret Curran (former Labour MP)

“As relevant a source as the Financial Times.”
– Kezia Dugdale (former leader, Scottish Labour Party)

“The press hate Wings Over Scotland, not least because it is a rival. But for hundreds of thousands of Scots it was an invaluable source of facts and arguments with which to challenge the predominantly unionist message of the mainstream media.”
– Iain Macwhirter (The Herald/Sunday Herald)

“Wings Over Scotland is the nation’s most trusted media outlet.”
– Brian Ferguson (The Scotsman)

“Enabling a new breed of fascism.”
– Peter Jukes (Byline.com)

“Wings Over Scotland really is the most effective, wide reaching and important media of communication available to the Scottish independence movement.”
– Craig Murray (former UK diplomat and ambassador to Uzbekistan)

“A pugnacious website popular among sections of the alt-Nat community. Its proprietor, Stuart Campbell, has a way of expressing himself in a colourful style.”
– Alex Massie (The Times)

“Clever and highly effective.”
– Duncan Hothersall (Scottish Labour activist and party chair)

“Wings Over Scotland is the most reprehensible extreme of the independence movement. The organisation would be far and away the most despicable participant ever to have sought involvement in Holyrood.”
– unnamed Scottish Conservatives spokesman

“The SNP’s answer to Voldemort.”
– Alyn Smith (SNP MP)

“The most powerful political blog in Scotland.”
– Mark Devlin, (“The Majority”, pro-Union activist group)

“A curry for anyone who can tell me who Wings Over Scotland is.”
– Euan McColm (Scotland On Sunday)

As Mr McColm would have known had he applied his fearsome investigative skills to reading the byline that’s always been clearly printed at the top of each of the site’s articles, or indeed by reading this ever-present page, Wings is owned and edited by the Rev. Stuart Campbell, a Liberal Democrat voter at every election from 1992 to 2010 inclusive and, reluctantly, in 2017. (2015 general election vote: spoiled paper.)

“Campbell is the maverick blogger who has arguably done more than anybody, bar First Minister Alex Salmond, to break up Britain. A threat to the nation.”
– Ben Bryant (VICE)

“A bit of a rebel, a buccaneer and a brigand who’s got far too much to say for himself. He doesn’t retreat and gets into fights with everyone. Newspapers used to be like that too. I like his style.”
– Kevin McKenna (The Observer)

“The poster boy for a certain type of online independence campaigner… an IT-literate troublemaker.”
– Paul Hutcheon (Sunday Herald)

“Spiritual leader of the conspiracists… prone to the kind of intemperate rants that have helped to turn Twitter into such a toxic environment.”
– Graham Grant (Daily Mail)

“A significant number of people appear to be using this one man’s personal opinion to decide how to vote in the referendum.”
– Ben Borland (Scottish Sunday Express)

“Whether you love, loathe or grudgingly respect him, the Bath-based nationalist is the Yes movement’s most influential opinion shaper, excluding Nicola Sturgeon herself… as famed for his vitriolic style as he is for his robust, landscape-shifting journalism.”
– Darren McGarvey (The Scotsman)

“He might be from the Dark Side, if you know what I mean.”
– Lt Col Stuart Crawford (Royal Tank Regiment, ret’d)

“King of the Cybernats.”
– Tom Harris (former Labour MP and UK government minister)

“The Wings cretin is like a human sewer.”
– Chris Deerin (Telegraph/Daily Mail)

“This ambulatory piece of excrement.”
– Brooke “Belle De Jour” Magnanti (prostitute turned author)

“The voice of sanity.”
– Jim Spence (broadcaster and journalist, BBC Scotland/The Courier)

“A master of calumny.”
– Roderick W. Dunlop (Queen’s Counsel)

“A man of principle.”
– Sheriff Nigel A. Ross (Edinburgh Sheriff Court)

“The outlaw king of the nationalist hardcore, a sarcastic outsider laying waste to Scotland’s overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media”
– Scott Hames/Dominic Hinde (New Statesman)

“The vilest possible person.”
– Susan Calman (BBC Radio 4)

“A white, middle-aged, hate-filled troll.”
– Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour Party leader)

“He is absolutely vile, and through his divisive demagoguery he more than any other single individual could present the biggest threat to our independence.”
– Pete Wishart (super-comfortable SNP MP)

“A lot of people really value what you do.”
– Kevin Scott (The Herald, PricewaterhouseCoopers)

“Wings is a law unto himself. He takes instructions from no-one.”
– James Kelly (Scot Goes Pop)

“That snake oil salesman… a low quality propagandist.”
– Michael White (The Guardian)

“Stuart Campbell has wound up a lot of people because his media-monitoring service often destroys and points up the hypocrisies and the mistakes and the misdirections of the so-called mainstream media, and I think his service is an extremely good service.”
– Stuart Cosgrove (author and broadcaster, BBC/Channel 4)

“The SNP’s Cybernat General.”
– Jackie Baillie (Labour MSP)

“Articulate, fluent and smart… Bathgate’s answer to Jane Austen.”
– Kenny Farquharson (The Times)

“Abusive online wingnut.”
– Blair McDougall (Director of “Better Together” campaign)

“One of Twitter’s prominent spewers of invective.”
– Gillian Bowditch (Sunday Times)

“Deranged maniac… a little bit nuts.”
– David Torrance (The Herald)

“I am not responsible for Stuart Campbell.”
– Nicola Sturgeon (First Minister of Scotland)

The site advocates Scottish independence, but is not affiliated or connected in any way to the SNP, and neither gives to or receives money from the party, nor indeed any other party. We have an inquiring mind, and welcome intelligent contributions from all sides of the political debate.

Got something worthwhile to say about Scotland’s future? Try us.

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COMMENTING

Wings Over Scotland has an open comments policy – if you’re a new user your first comment needs to be manually approved as an anti-spam measure, but after that anything you say will be published automatically and unmoderated, and without making users negotiate irritating Captchas or social-media registrations/logins.

However, please note that the Akismet spam filter built in to all WordPress sites will sometimes place comments which contain links – and particularly multiple links – into the moderation queue, even from approved users. Such comments won’t appear until we manually accept them, which can take anything from a few seconds to several hours if we’re out at the shops or something.

This is outwith our control, unless we want to be swamped by the literally thousands of spambot messages a day that Akismet intercepts. If you want to post several links, it’s best to do it in several comments with one link in each.

We reserve the right to edit/remove comments at any time, for legal reasons or in the event of sustained personal abuse, trolling that’s aimed purely and intentionally at disrupting rather than promoting debate, or spam which somehow manages to evade Akismet. But you’ll have to try very hard indeed, and ignore repeated warnings, to have any sort of censorship for content applied here.

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ETIQUETTE AND FORMATTING

There are, however, some rules. As the site’s readership has grown, so has the number of comments. Four-figure numbers in a single day aren’t unprecedented, and that brings with it certain responsibilities for commenters, because we can’t spend all day monitoring them and still produce the site. So please keep a few things in mind.

1. Write as if an undecided voter is reading.

Fewer than 1% of the site’s readers post comments. That means the comments give you an inaccurate picture of the overall readership, and things that might go down well within a small group of dedicated activists don’t sound so good to people who’ve come to the site looking for information to help make up their minds.

People without whom we won’t win.

So try to avoid puerile name-calling like “Bitter Together”, “Johann Lamentable” or hilarious mis-spellings/puns of Anas Sarwar’s name. The same goes for things like “Liebore”, “Wastemonster” and “Daily Retard”, and words like “Quisling” and “traitor”.

Do you think they’re more likely to win someone over, or to put them off? Would they work on you if the positions were reversed? If not, don’t say them.

(We’d also happily live for another 300 years without ever again seeing anyone using the phrase “parcel of rogues” as if they were the first person who ever thought of it, or posting entire poems or song lyrics. That’s what YouTube’s for.)

Use of the word “rape” to refer to anything other than the criminal offence is also unwelcome. So the sentence “Wastemonster has been raping Scotland for decades, but you’ll never hear those Liebore-apologist traitors at the Daily Retard reporting it”… well, don’t hold your breath waiting for that comment to show up, is what we’re saying.

2. Play the ball, not the man (or woman).

And by all means disagree, by all means disagree forcefully – but argue with people’s views, don’t insult them personally. And that includes calling them “trolls” or implying they’re undercover Unionists. We’ll decide if someone’s trolling or not. But in the meantime, if you think they are, ignore them.

If you know what a “troll” is, then you’ll also know that getting you angry and talking about them, derailing the conversation off the subject, is exactly what they want.

Email us about suspected trolls if you want. But don’t engage them in debate if you doubt their motives, and DEFINITELY don’t engage in on-thread discussions about whether they’re a troll or not.

3. Show other commenters some courtesy.

It’d be nice if all that ever mattered was the content of what you wrote. But it isn’t. Whether we like it or not, the way things look also has a huge effect on whether people read them and pay any attention.

If you post a comment that’s 3,000 words long but doesn’t have a single line break or punctuation mark, not one living soul will read it. But more importantly, the chances are that they won’t read anything that comes after it either, and that’s an arrogant and selfish thing to do to other people’s comments. We have some amazing commenters here, and they deserve not to have the information they impart undermined.

So please, please, please put some paragraphs breaks into your posts. One after every two or three sentences is a good ballpark figure. And as you’re using the internet, not a typewriter, there’s NEVER, EVER any reason for hitting Return once. It’s either none or two, depending whether you’re starting a new paragraph or not.

Terrible use of paragraph breaks (which includes using none, or far too many, or sticking loads of extra ones at the beginning or end of your post for no appreciable reason) will put your comment at severe risk of deletion.

4. Microsoft are evil.

Please don’t paste comments in from Microsoft Word. It creates utter havoc, because Microsoft are made of liquid incompetence and general horror. (Ref: Windows 8.)

5. There’s a time and place for everything.

Comment threads go off-topic. That’s okay. But posting about a completely different subject in the first few comments on an article is just mind-bogglingly rude.

If you have something totally unrelated that you really really have to say, either post it in an older thread or just bite your tongue for the four or five minutes it’ll take for there to be half-a-dozen on-topic comments. Break this rule and you’ll either get timestamp-shifted to two hours into the future or deleted, depending how cranky a mood we’re in.

6. Scotland has a world-renowned education system.

So there’s really no excuse for putting spaces before full stops and question marks at the end of sentences, or for starting your paragraphs with an indentation. Or for doing this: “…………………………..” or this: “ .  .  .  .  .  . ” when you mean this: “…“.

Or for not at least knowing that sentences start with a capital letter.

Your comment won’t be deleted for breaking those sorts of rules, but please believe us when we say that if you do we’ll be positively itching to find other reasons.

7. Don’t mess up the page for everyone else.

If you post YouTube links with the http:// part at the start, they’ll embed on the page rather than being posted as links. That can lead to this sort of thing. So don’t include the http:// bit or you’ll find your video in the spam bin.

8. Remember you’re talking to people.

If you were in the pub with some friends and someone asked you what you wanted to drink, would you say “Pint of lager shandy, please, Bob. ALBA GU BRATH!”? If you wouldn’t bellow slogans at them every time you’d finished speaking, then don’t do it in bloody comments either.

The same goes for signing your name at the bottom of your comment. We can see your name on the left-hand side already. If you want people to know you’re called Steve, call yourself Steve in the name box, not “Super_Sovereign_Warrior952”.

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Please note that spelling errors and typos are excluded from our grammar-Nazi purge. Being dyslexic isn’t a crime. But for the other stuff – especially the absence of line breaks – there will be no mercy. Those are the rules. That is all.

The momentum behind a Lib-Lab coalition seems at the time of writing to be slipping away, as one braindead Labour MP or grandee after another comes out to argue against it in front of an eager media. If Labour's 1983 election manifesto was the longest suicide note in history, today's collected BBC News interviews could be among the shortest.

Because here's what happens if Labour retards like David Blunkett, John Reid, Tom Harris and Wee Dougie Alexander scupper this agreement.

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Less than six months passed between these two comments.

And the weird thing is that the strategy in both cases was/is the exact same. Huh.

We’ve been telling you for quite some time now that after eight wasted years of doing absolutely nothing with endless mandates, the SNP establishment want to back away from the party’s defining goal of Scottish independence and settle in for some lovely cosy lifelong careers at Westminster and in the devolved Holyrood, with well-paid staffer jobs for all their pals, followed by tidy £50,000-a-year pensions.

Maybe some of you didn’t believe us.

Maybe you could have another think about it.

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Boris Johnson infamously once hid in a fridge to avoid any awkward questions. Nicola Sturgeon prefers a different kind of small rectangular space, but it’s the same move.

Well done to the Times for attempting to ask one of the obvious questions arising from the events – do the Murrells have a joint bank account? – and we hope someone will ask the others soon. (Why such a specific amount? Why hasn’t it all been paid back yet if it was just a June-2021 cash-flow matter? Why can the Times STILL not credit where they pinched the story from?)

But it wasn’t the only thing the SNP ran scared from today.

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