Last night this happened.
The events marked simply and unquestionably the most shameful and contemptible moment in the history of the Scottish Parliament since 1707.
We’ve been watching the Labour Party annual conference today, at which North British Branch Office manager Richard Leonard apparently gave a speech.
Unfortunately the BBC News coverage wasn’t very helpful with its captioning, so we have no idea which of the people below is him. Can anyone help?
We’ll be keeping this post updated throughout the day with news as it comes in.
Remember as you look at these images: this is a modern European state reacting to an entirely peaceful democratic movement and process in 2017.
We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.
But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.
It’s a sleepy Wednesday in July, so let’s celebrate some proud British culture!
Hanzala Malik has been a Glasgow Labour politician for 22 years without anyone noticing. His Wikipedia entry sums up his contribution to Scottish politics over that time in a single 25-word sentence amounting to “served on some committees”.
But he got noticed yesterday.
Because so committed was Malik to the core ideological principle of Scottish Labour – namely that absolutely everything bad that happens anywhere is the SNP’s fault – that he somewhat overstretched himself and blamed them for the closure of six Jobcentres in Glasgow, despite the startlingly obvious facts that responsibility for the decision lies solely with the UK government and the closures have been opposed consistently by every SNP MP in the city, two things Malik can’t possibly have not known.
After an outcry on social media when an alert Wings reader spotted the falsehood, Malik quietly amended the Facebook post twice, first from an attack on “the SNP” to the rather ambiguous “Government” and then finally to the accurate “UK government”. But “SNP BAD” will always be Labour’s instinctive default reaction.
Following the striking success of their tactical voting campaign at the general election of 2015, the Unionist parties are keen to repeat the strategy this year, and have once again deployed THE WHEEL.
There’s only one problem. They can’t quite agree on the colours of the spokes.
The Daily Telegraph just released a video called “100 Reasons Why Brexit Was A Good Thing”. It listed them to a soundtrack of “Jerusalem”, the same song that closed the Labour Party conference earlier this week with its stirring ode to just one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.
100 reasons why #Brexit was a good thing pic.twitter.com/s2gyYSDUzJ
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 30, 2016
We’ve saved a few of the highlights below, just in case the Telegraph should delete the video in a fit of sanity. We’ve also added one fake one. See if you can spot it.
When you choose to declare to the world that you’re not actually a country but just a small region of someone else’s, this sort of thing will happen.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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