Wings Over Scotland

For much of last year, this site advocated a rational but unpopular position – namely that the SNP, which at the time held the balance of power in the UK parliament, should offer to support Theresa May’s soft-Brexit deal in exchange for the transfer of powers to hold a second independence referendum.

The logic was clear – nothing was ever going to stop Brexit from happening, but passing May’s deal would save the UK from the catastrophe of a no-deal. Everyone would be a winner – England and Wales would get what they voted for, Remain-voting Northern Ireland would get special terms that kept it in the EU in all but name, and Scotland would get the chance to stay in the EU as an independent nation.

“But no!”, everyone screamed at us. “We can’t possibly do any sort of deal with the Tories or we’d be electorally crucified and lose the referendum, you idiots!”

Record scratch, jump-cut to the present day.

[Pause for long, weary sigh.]

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Or to be more precise, wouldn’t happen.

It sucks being right all the time. But at least now, as we asked for, the lie is over. So that’s a good thing. We suppose we should celebrate, but we don’t feel much like it.

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29 June 2016. Don’t say we don’t warn you, readers.

And this was February of the same year, when Barack Obama and David Cameron were still in charge of their respective nations:

You’ll always read it here first, folks. Even when you don’t want to.

Almost exactly two years ago, this website suggested that it might not be the smartest idea for Labour to go along with Theresa May’s call for a snap election. (Under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, it couldn’t have happened without Labour’s support.)

And it occurred to us today that if they hadn’t, the current government would only have a maximum of one year left to run.

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So there was a football match at the weekend.

At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.

But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?

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Regular readers of this site will be impressed, if perhaps less than astonished, at the new high score achieved this week in the timeless game of McTernan Predicts:

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It’s 4.36am. I’m going to go to bed in a minute. I’m hoping that I get up in a few hours and laugh at this, delighted at my own unfounded pessimism.

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Back in May we wrote this:

The prediction duly came true, as most of ours do. Sometimes we hate being right.

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Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:

It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?

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On the left, the Conservatives’ 2015 general election manifesto.

On the right, yesterday’s Press & Journal. We wish we could even fake surprise.

Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.

Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.

The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.

Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.

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We’ve been keeping an eye out for something for a while now.

And today we found out.

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