Wings Over Scotland

This week on Wings has been altogether more navel-gazey than we’re comfortable with, as various SNP MPs have mounted a series of all-out personal attacks on the site before the weekend’s crucial NEC elections.

So we’ll have a proper article for you a little later on today, but in the meantime it’d be remiss of us not to tidy up the last fragments of shrapnel, so we’ll direct you to the right of reply to Alyn Smith’s column that The National kindly gave us today:

(Sadly they chose to disable comments, we’d quite have enjoyed the reaction from the few remaining diehard leadership loyalists still posting there.)

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We couldn’t help but chuckle yesterday when the £100K-a-year Westminster MP and obsessive Wings Over Scotland reader “Pension Pete” Wishart announced – in the space of six minutes – that this site was simultaneously an irrelevance that nobody listened to, but also somehow one of the greatest threats to independence.

It got a lot funnier today, though.

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We’ve just been alerted to a new FOI response. It pretty much speaks for itself.

But it’s worth pondering the numbers.

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Wings Over Scotland marked its ninth birthday earlier this month. To be honest, we totally forgot about it until someone reminded us. Normally we mark the anniversary with a small reflection and taking of stock over how things are going, but this year we couldn’t be bothered – we’d already mentioned readership stats in August.

But today in The National we found out that we were apparently dead.

But reports of our demise have been, as the saying goes, somewhat exaggerated.

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We don’t mind admitting we were quivering with anticipation, readers.

So let’s go.

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Sometimes, despite everything, you just have to laugh.

No matter how black and rueful a laugh it might be.

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From 2016 (and another classic in the “missing words” category).

We were keen to read the article, obviously.

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The Scottish Parliament will today almost certainly pass a dangerously misleading and inaccurate motion to mark “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, and in doing so will join countless other institutions across the UK captured by trans ideology to the great detriment of women’s rights, freedom of speech and general sanity.

So we thought we’d mark it with a very short fact check.

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One of the dumber things we see regularly posted on social media is that Yes voices should stop criticising the First Minister because her leadership is the only reason Yes is now consistently ahead in the polls and we would have no chance of winning a new referendum with someone else in charge.

This is obviously nonsense, because Nicola Sturgeon was SNP leader and FM for five years in which support moved barely a single millimetre, until COVID-19 came along. Our current lead is due entirely to a tiny invisible virus and a giant Etonian buffoon.

But you know us, readers – we like to check.

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Some years ago, a friend of mine was on a car journey along the motorway, with their brother driving. The night before there had been a storm and high winds. The bad weather had continued into the morning before easing, but the wind was still strong.

They were chatting in the car and as they continued to chat, my friend noticed that further along, a motorway stanchion that holds the lights had fallen across their path. It was blocking two of the three lanes, including the one that they were on. Despite that, they continued to chat as if it wasn’t there.

The obstacle drew nearer and nearer. Finally my friend said to his brother, “Aren’t you going to drive round that light?” His brother swerved and made it into the unblocked lane with feet to spare.

I asked my friend why they hadn’t swerved sooner. “Neither of us could believe it was there”, he said.

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We genuinely empathise, anonymous senior Scottish Tory.

If only there was some solution available.