Wings Over Scotland

There was a certain uncomfortable 2018 inevitability this morning over the fact that where people were offended, arrests would follow.

And the burning of a cardboard model of the Grenfell Tower last night was certainly right up near the top in the pantheon of cretinously offensive things. Many victims of the appalling tragedy, which killed 72 people and injured many more, still haven’t been properly rehomed almost a year and a half later.

But if it’s a CRIME, we have some questions.

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There’s a remarkable piece in today’s Times about Stefan Cross, the lawyer working for the women in the Glasgow City Council equal-pay dispute. (For example it’s over 1500 words long but the word “Labour” doesn’t appear a single time, despite the party having controlled the council for the entire 20 years or so the dispute covers.)

The most interesting passage, though, is this one.

Because the story reveals that the GMB, an ultra-loyalist Labour and Unionist trade union, did absolutely everything in its power to obstruct and hamper the women’s claims until the spring of 2017, at which point the union experienced a Damascene conversion and threw their weight fully behind the women and against the council.

If only there’d been some fundamental alteration in the nature of the council around a year and a half ago which could explain such a “complete cultural change” in the GMB’s attitude and enthusiasm for equality, eh readers?

In many ways the Glasgow equal-pay dispute feels like the impotent final fury of the dinosaurs after the dust cloud of a prehistoric asteroid impact blacked out the sun and condemned them all to death.

What we’re seeing now is a futile howl of rage against irrelevance by the shady cabal of Labour politicians and senior trade union officials who used to treat the city as their personal fiefdom, as they sink into inglorious extinction.

We highly recommend clicking that link to read the whole series of tweets from Labour member and solicitor Ian Smart, who readers won’t need reminding is no sort of friend of the SNP or inclined to their defence. Because the story goes much deeper than the common-or-garden hypocrisy we saw yesterday.

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We don’t know whether Sky News’ senior Scotland correspondent James Matthews recognised double-jobbing Labour MP and councillor Hugh Gaffney on today’s strike march in Glasgow or not. (We suspect he did, but as Gaffney’s only been an MP for a year and a half we can’t be sure.)

What’s certain is that he gave him plenty of time, opportunity and cues to disclose who he was, and Gaffney didn’t take any of them, leading to this extraordinary clip.

Which is, y’know, pretty bold.

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Today:

But that’s only fair, because after all – oh:

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Well well, look who suddenly believes in second referendums.

It’s fascinating to note how you can completely reverse Kezia Dugdale’s position on the subject simply by substituting the word “Scotland” for the words “the UK” in that second tweet, and imagine she was talking about the independence march in heavily-Remain-voting Edinburgh earlier this month instead of the (proportionately smaller) one in London yesterday.

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When indoor-hat-wearing uberYoon nutter George Galloway appeared in some of the madder corners of the gutter press this week after appearing on RT to extravagantly belittle last weekend’s indy marchers, we didn’t bother talking about it because who cares what that irrelevant old zoomer thinks, right?

But when an alert reader drew our attention to this spectacular clip of Galloway’s pre-indyref and post-indyref views on the EU we couldn’t let it go, because it so perfectly encapsulates not just what a huge buffoon George Galloway is, but the jaw-dropping, bare-faced, crass hypocrisy of so much Unionist argument.

We’re only sad he’s neither a politician nor in Scotland, or he’d be a shoo-in.

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We honestly don’t think they even see it, folks.

We truly don’t.

Tory MSP Miles Briggs was yesterday cleared of sexual harassment claims by an internal Conservative Party inquiry process. We haven’t the slightest idea of what the facts of his specific case may or may not be, and as such express no view on it, but the nature of the process has been severely criticised by Rape Crisis Scotland, and with what in this instance appears to be extremely good reason.

An obvious question does rather leap to mind, though.

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Vince Cable, who was once apparently some sort of politician, took it upon himself to issue an opinion yesterday on the subject of referendums that had independence supporters on social media hooting with mocking laughter long into the night.

The estimable Wee Ginger Dug has already dealt adroitly with just the 300 or so most obviously ridiculous aspects of Cable’s tone-deaf and spectacularly hypocritical view, so we won’t step on his paws by repeating them here.

Instead we thought we’d do what we do best, and check the facts.

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Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.

One man, of course, led from the front.

Ouch.

As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers in two decades of being an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.

Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.

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So this didn’t go down too well on social media last night.

Prof Bueltmann, who’s made her life in Scotland for 20 years, was (as far as we can tell) the only independence supporter to speak at a poorly-attended rally in Edinburgh calling for a fatuously-named “People’s Vote” on Brexit.

Pretty much everyone else on the platform had campaigned for No in 2014 in one way or another, from Gavin “grassroots” Esler to Rory “best of both worlds” Bremner, Ming “freeze out the Nats” Campbell and Malcolm “Medics for No” Macleod.

And when some Twitter users expressed a modicum of resentment at being ordered to get behind the “People’s Vote” campaign by the very people who are responsible for Scotland still being shackled to the UK and therefore dragged out of the EU in the first place, the Unionists got terribly hurt and sniffy.

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