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Wings Over Scotland



From the archives #9 88

Posted on June 17, 2019 by

The Times, 30 June 1998.

Wait, Michael who? Well, this should be good.

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Starting the car 393

Posted on May 28, 2019 by

Ah, some classic Scottish Labour action right here:

A week (and a day) really IS a long time in politics.

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Message received, not understood 103

Posted on May 28, 2019 by

While we’re on the subject of Unionists not listening:

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Face trippin’ 243

Posted on May 27, 2019 by

We thought you might enjoy watching Sarah Smith just about remembering to mention the European elections while conveying to a watching nation her amazement that the dastardly SNP still want independence, from tonight’s Reporting Scotland.

Nae luck, hen.

Not YOU, Scotland (part 784) 68

Posted on March 08, 2019 by

The Foreign Secretary in September 2018:

And after an apparent change of heart in March 2019:

What an absolute Hunt, eh readers?

Counting With Scottish Labour 102

Posted on February 16, 2019 by

A little snippet in today’s Times caught our eye earlier.

As alert readers may recall from our numerous investigations into the enduring enigma that is Scottish Labour’s membership figures, at the end of 2014 the branch office was claiming to have either 14,000 or 20,000 members.

And even in a world where 38% is “almost half” and five is half of seven, there’s still no way you can get 21,000 to be “almost double” either 14,000 or 20,000.

Were Labour lying in 2014, or are they lying now, or (and this is our guess) were they lying both times and their real membership is nothing like any of those unverified, unscrutinised, plucked-from-the-air numbers?

We’ll probably never know, and it’ll almost certainly never matter.

Counting With The Scottish Media 111

Posted on February 08, 2019 by

What does two plus two make?

Let’s all do it together, shall we?

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Another unfortunate oversight 484

Posted on January 30, 2019 by

Earlier on today we reported on a case of a Scottish Labour MP being inadvertently unacquainted with some quite pertinent facts regarding a public pronouncement they’d made. While we’d assumed this to be an isolated incident, it’s in fact our sad duty to report another example within the Northern Branch Office.

That’s the pro-Brexit former Labour minister Tom Harris, there, making just the sort of statement that this site like to fact-check. So let’s see the most recent data.

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A surprising convert 93

Posted on November 22, 2018 by

It’s always the ones you least suspect, isn’t it?

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The threatened member 136

Posted on November 16, 2018 by

Ah, remember these simpler times, readers?

Thank goodness for etc etc.

The rank outsider 410

Posted on October 24, 2018 by

And we do mean rank. It’s been quite a week already for super-hapless Labour MP Hugh Gaffney, but he excelled himself today when joining in with Scottish Labour’s campaign to resist building a new hospital in Gartcosh (which is the recommendation of an independent NHS panel), rather than on the site of the current one in Monklands.

(And yes, that is the same one Labour wanted to shut down in 2007.)

Because it wasn’t terribly long ago that he took a rather different view.

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The challenger responds 343

Posted on October 08, 2018 by

We felt sure that our awarding of the inaugural Thickest Politician In Scotland title this morning would be taken as the throwing down of a gauntlet, and we weren’t wrong. Because within just hours, the Prince Regent had staked his claim to the crown.

Greene – who was rejected by the voters of Cunninghame North by almost 9,000 votes but sits in Parliament anyway – is in fact supposed to serve the people of the West Scotland region as a list MSP, not the whole country, and we’re not aware of any breakdown of how Scotland’s eight list regions voted in 2014 so we have no idea how many voted No in WS. But that’s by far the least idiotic part of the tweet.

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