Wings Over Scotland

Bless ’em, they’re getting closer. After some nagging, the Herald has now finally changed the story about jobs at Faslane that it printed a correction for earlier this week. And credit to them, the new version is a good 5% less wrong than the original.

Rather more distressingly, though, the newly-edited story still doesn’t match up even to the Herald’s own correction, never mind any kind of reality.

Read the rest of this entry →

Yesterday we noted how Scottish Labour deleted evidence of an embarrassing policy U-turn from its website after it was highlighted by Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Questions. We suspected that it wouldn’t be the last example of the phenomenon, and sure enough we happened to stumble across this page earlier this morning.

It’s a press release from before the 2011 Holyrood election, by Scottish Labour’s shadow health minister and serial fibber Jackie Baillie. But we noticed something seemed to be missing from it that we were sure we remembered. So we went and checked out the same press release on Jackie Baillie’s own website. In the quote below, the sentence in bold is a line still visible on Baillie’s homepage, but which is oddly missing from the Scottish Labour version.

“The Tories’ solution is to increase prescription charges, putting an even greater burden on patients suffering from chronic illnesses. Their message is that if you are ill we will also make you poor. Labour is fully supportive of free prescriptions and will continue this policy if we are elected to Government next May.“

The text of the two releases is otherwise identical down to the last word. Just that one solitary line has unaccountably fallen off the page in the journey between sites. We don’t mind telling you, readers, we’re completely baffled.

Watching FMQs yesterday, a thought suddenly occurred to us. Is it possible that a lot of Scottish people’s reluctance to support independence isn’t because they think the south-east of England knows what’s best for Scotland, but because they’re simply terrified of the possibility of someone other than the SNP winning an election to an independent Scottish Parliament, and thereby risking putting the entire nation in the hands of the likes of Johann Lamont, Jackie Baillie and Richard Baker?

Have we been making a terrible tactical error all this time? Should we, in fact, spend the next two years bigging up Scottish Labour and the rest of the Holyrood opposition instead of mercilessly exposing their hapless ineptitude at every turn? Should we do our best to reassure a frightened electorate that should the SNP split after independence (which some people think it will, though we don’t), there’s nothing to fear from a government that might include Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and James Kelly and have control of ALL of Scotland’s finances, welfare and defence?

Because if so we’ll give it a shot. But frankly, that’s going to be a tough sell.

Scottish Labour mouthpiece the Daily Record is currently running a long series of horror stories about Atos “Healthcare” and their appalling persecution of the sick and disabled. We heartily and sincerely commend the Record for doing so, even if it usually fails to note that Atos were unleashed on the poor and vulnerable by a Labour government, and occasionally just outright lies about it.

You might expect, then, that the valid concerns of the Record and its readers would be earnestly reflected by the nation’s Labour MSPs when the Scottish Parliament debated the issue of Atos’ conduct of Work Capability Assessments yesterday.

You’d be wrong, of course.

Read the rest of this entry →

When we started a politics website, we invested in the best equipment money could buy, because we knew we’d need to guard against double standards ourselves as well as measuring them in others. The Super HypocrisOMeter 5000 is an industrial-strength device, built to cope with the most extreme manifestations of a trait that is the stock-in-trade of all politicians. But this morning we switched it on and tried to run Labour’s reaction to a story in today’s Express through it, and look what happened:

Let’s be clear. We’re not especially fussed about the comments themselves. We’ve figuratively wished a few people dead in our time, and as we’ve recently noted, at the end of the day it’s just words on the internet. We’re deeply dismayed at the growing phenomenon where people can be prosecuted, fired from their job, or even threatened with prison just for saying unpleasant stuff that plainly isn’t meant in any threatening sense. Salmond Senior’s own admirable response strikes the perfect note of disdain.

We’re not even going to attempt to whip up any outrage about the fact that the Labour member in question chose to attack Alex Salmond’s 90-year-old father rather than the First Minister himself – that’s pathetic and despicable, rather than hypocritical. Nope, the thing that catastrophically overloaded the triple-locked shielding and emergency cutout protection of the Super HypocrisOMeter 5000 was Labour’s astonishing attempt to half-heartedly distance the party from the comments. As well as blithely and shamefully trying to insist that Mr Kelly’s views reflected a “substantive issue”, Labour’s unnamed spokesman offered the following high-handed dismissal:

“This desperate smear campaign falls at the first hurdle because this Facebook page is not owned, managed, or operated by Scottish Labour, and it will not detract from the rantings and ravings of SNP candidates – sacked or otherwise – online.

“Political parties are responsible for their candidates and officials, but members of the public must be responsible for their own behaviour.”

Those readers whose minds haven’t just boggled all the way into unconsciousness will very likely be struggling to reconcile this statement with Labour’s previous views on online extremism, at least when it’s practiced by the infamous “cybernats“:

“Mr Gray made a strongly worded attack on what he calls ‘vile cybernats’ during his final Scottish Labour conference speech. And today Mr Gray writes in The Scotsman that he has discovered ‘at least one post suggesting that a particular journalist should be shot’.

Mr Gray also accused the SNP leadership of a “tolerance of this culture”. He also said that all voters ‘should be worried’ by internet postings from some SNP supporters, who he says are ‘poisoning the vital debate we now face’ on Scotland’s future. There is also a claim from Mr Gray, who stands down as leader on 17 December, that the SNP internet posters are ‘undermining the decency of the country’.“

Iain Gray has, of course, been far from alone among senior Labour figures in insisting that the “cybernats” – a disparate group of largely-anonymous individuals, of whom all, some or none might actually be SNP members – operate under the explicit instruction and control of the SNP leadership:

“Labour’s Anas Sarwar said: “Everyone knows that Alex Salmond desperately wants a second question on the ballot and now he has left the door open for his army of cybernats to deliver the response he wants.”“

Ever since 2011, Labour and its tame media have ramped up the angle that the SNP leadership must “do something about the cybernats“. Prominent features are headlined with pious pleas or strident demands for the SNP to condemn their nefarious activities, even as elected Labour MPs, MSPs and councillors (rather than random internet users) freely compare Alex Salmond to Hitler, Robert Mugabe or Slobodan Milosevic or call SNP politicians and members ‘traitors” without the hysterical press opprobrium which accompanies “cybernats” doing the same thing.

The Facebook group on which Alex Salmond’s father was wished dead was not an open group populated by any old internet loonies who wandered along. It’s closed to the public and the controlled, vetted membership of 533 includes the Scottish party’s foremost and finest – as well as current “leader” Johann Lamont and her “deputy” Anas Sarwar along with Shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran, former First Minister Jack McConnell, MPs Cathy Jamieson, Ian Davidson, Eric Joyce, Sarah Boyack, Tom Harris, Tom Greatrex and Tom Watson, and front-bench MSPs Jackie Baillie, Ken Macintosh and James Kelly, are all members.

(Most of the prominent online Labour activists whose names our readers will recognise also belong to the group, including John Ruddy, Aidan Skinner, Duncan Hothersall and Cllr Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher. Only the lovely Terry Kelly is unaccountably missing.)

We don’t think it’s dreadfully unreasonable to suggest that with a membership list like that, Scottish Labour has a lot more control and responsibility over what’s posted on the group than the SNP does over random anonymous Twitter users or comment-thread posters. In a world where suggesting that certain actions of rival politicians might be “anti-Scottish” generates hundreds of column inches and loud demands for resignation, we look forward to the blanket media coverage demanding that the leadership takes urgent action against this vile cyberBrit menace nestling in the very bosom of Scottish Labour. We’re certain it’ll be along any minute now.

A photo-gallery of excited, enthusiastic Labour supporters at Dundee’s Caird Hall for the Scottish Labour conference and keynote speech by Ed Miliband this afternoon.

(All these pics are taken from live BBC web coverage. Most of them are during Miliband’s address, but a few were also shot in the 20 or so minutes of speeches immediately preceding it, featuring Jim Murphy and various others.)

Read the rest of this entry →

First Minister's Questions is rarely a hugely edifying spectacle, but this blog could barely watch to the end of yesterday's proceedings. Labour's leader exhibited a heady mix of ignorance and xenophobia, while the FM's Conservative counterpart opted for a barely-believable combination of direct personal abuse (which could truthfully be paraphrased as "You're fat, ha ha!") and petty timewasting. If we tell you, dear readers, that Willie Rennie took on the role of the calm, intelligent voice of reason (with a dull but substantive question about freedom-of-information laws), you'll perhaps grasp the full degree to which the other two opposition leaders lost the plot.

It was one of the rowdiest FMQs in recent memory, with the Presiding Officer forced to repeatedly call for order, specifically warn Labour's Jackie Baillie to behave herself, and on one occasion even resort to a sharp bang of her gavel in order to silence the cacophanous hooting and jeering coming from – mostly – the opposition benches. The First Minister himself looked dismayed, surprised and somewhat ashamed at the picture of Scotland's political elite being portrayed to the world, and it would be hard for any impartial observer to disagree with his judgement.

Read the rest of this entry →

———————————————————————————————————————–

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

———————————————————————————————————————–

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.

.

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.

.

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”.

.I

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.

"Interview body language experts agree that the less you move your arms and hands about the more confident and in control you are."
– On Using Body Language During Interviews

Non-Scottish readers probably don't know who this man is. You're missing out.

Read the rest of this entry →

It is, we’ve remarked before, often difficult to satirise Scottish Labour, because it’s hard to think of anything more fatuous, transparently hypocritical or just plain idiotic than the things they actually say for real. The party’s recent demand that the Scottish Government should set up a “resilience fund” to cushion the blow of falls in oil prices – or as everyone else on Earth usually calls it, an “oil fund” – is only the latest example.

There are just five months between the two tweets above. Yet Labour seemingly believes that the Scottish public will already have completely forgotten that the party spent most of the last two years telling Scots an oil fund was a mad, impossible idea.

But it’s even more ludicrous than it sounds.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.

The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)

This should be interesting, then.

Read the rest of this entry →

For the seasoned political analyst (and also for idiots like us), it can be hard to offer a rational explanation for why any thinking human being would ever believe a word the Labour Party says about anything any more.

It came to power 16 years ago promising to introduce electoral reform, then ditched it. (But still hilariously claims to be committed to the principle despite 100 years of failing to deliver it.) It also pledged not to introduce university tuition fees, then introduced them. It campaigned for re-election on a promise not to increase them, then increased them. It – well, we could go on all day, just about tuition fees alone.

But let’s cut to the chase and move up to the present day.

Read the rest of this entry →