When we have a rare spare moment, readers, there’s nothing we enjoy more for a bit of fun and relaxation than to fire off a few Freedom Of Information requests.
And just for some variety, last month we sent a couple to the UK Parliament – mainly on behalf of our Number One fan, Pete Wishart MP.
The answers came in this week.
Since the events of the last few days, folks, we’ve noticed a real ramping up of abuse towards Wings on social media from what one might call the small-L “loyalist” cult wing of the SNP. Like this dude, for example.
(A “miserable misogynist misanthrope” and “yesterday’s boring fart”? That’s a simply outrageous slur. I’m not misogynist.)
Alarmed at the news our traffic was apparently “collapsing”, we thought we’d check to see whether the situation was beyond saving.
So here’s how long it took for Scottish transactivists to make the scenes in Washington DC tonight all about (1) them, and (2) me:
These people be crazy.
Because 2020 is the maddest year in history, Ruth Davidson opened her contribution to Holyrood’s debate on the Brexit deal today with a lengthy quote from this website.
Because hey, why NOT, right?
Honestly hard to say who’s trying to wind up Yes supporters the most here.
We’ll leave it to you to decide.
We must admit, the terrible people that we are, we’ve been enjoying watching today’s extended meltdown by the SNP’s woke faction about last night’s NEC election results. Because it appears their egos are so huge that they’re not even smart enough to play dignified to spoil our schadenfreudish fun. It’s been full-on public tantrums.
But this nonsense needs briefly addressing.
Lavish expenses recipient Pete Wishart MP doesn’t want to talk about Wings.
So that’s probably the end of that.
Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.
Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.
The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.
These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).
Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.
(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)
We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.
Alert readers will probably have noticed that earlier today we featured a post by SNP MP Kenny MacAskill making the seemingly-unsurprising statement that the purpose of his party is to “bring about the end of the British state”.
So we thought he might have wanted to check with his colleague Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokeman and an obsessive Russophobe, when we saw a snide quote from him in a Belfast Telegraph story disparaging former leader Alex Salmond (who’d advocated the reunification of Ireland during a chat with ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern) for the heinous crime of “proposing the disruption of the United Kingdom”.
It later transpired that there’d been an error and the quote should have been (and now is) attributed to a Scottish Conservatives spokesman.
But we couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of shock with which the comment was received on social media in the several hours between its publication and correction, as if nobody thought it at all implausible that McDonald would have said such a thing. (And indeed, it’s barely different from what he HAS said about Salmond’s RT show.) There were plenty harsh criticisms of him, but we didn’t see a single tweet suggesting that a mistake might have been made.
Never more so than in 2020, sometimes fiction is more believable than truth.
We were looking for something else this afternoon, but accidentally found this:
Just two weeks before the last Holyrood election, widely-respected analysts Weber Shandwick had put together a prediction of how the results would pan out. Just for a bit of fun, let’s compare it to the reality.
What a band they were.
I wonder if he’d consider that a… Plan B?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
