Wings Over Scotland RIP

Yesterday, Reverend Stuart Campbell, the blogger known as Wings Over Scotland, declared, in a 4300-word suicide note, that his blogging days are over. Campbell had previously said that he had retired, but this apparently, is the ‘last, last’ time.

To signify the end of the independence movement, Campbell used a somewhat laboured metaphor of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in December 1969, which, due to a murder of an audience member by Hell’s Angels, signalled the end of the swinging 60s. Apparently, Sturgeon is a Hell’s Angel, stabbing the ‘peace and love’ of the indy movement to death, while the Stones play ‘Under My Thumb’!

The article is full of juicy observations on the state of a movement that isn’t going anywhere (see below), all salted by the delicious irony that Campbell encouraged the chaos he now sees before him. Like many Nationalists, he is appalled at the fire, but fails to remember that he rejoiced in pouring petrol on it.

It should be no surprise that when you vote for Nationalism, you get Nationalism in all its glory. When you turn a blind eye to declining services, scandals, financial impropriety, criminal acts, persecution of rivals, centralisation of power, cult-like behavior, and slavish leader worship, all for the ‘cause of the nation’, then you really do get the Government you deserve. When you continue to enable their bad behaviour by voting for them, despite all that, they know they can get away with it and it just gets worse and worse.

Sadly, the rest of us, who can see through this charade, who can see through cynical politicians gaining power and money while treating their followers as mugs, and treating the rest of us as collateral damage, don’t deserve it. One can only hope that one day the Reverend will understand his role and repent.

RIP Wings: 2013-2021. We won’t miss you.

From the article…

There is no “independence movement” any more, just an independence industry. It provides a very lucrative living for perhaps a couple of hundred people – SNP MPs, MSPs, party staff and apparatchiks, special advisers, quango heads and favoured civil servants lavishly rewarded for their personal loyalty to Nicola Sturgeon despite track records of incompetence, bungling and impropriety that have cost taxpayers a vast fortune.

The SNP, and in practice the wider Yes movement, is now firmly under the thumb of Sturgeon and her tiny closed cabal. The members’ influence on the party has been systematically shredded to the point where they’re now a rubber-stamp at best.

In embarking on a desperately-escalating attempt to silence her predecessor, motivated by baseless paranoia, Sturgeon revealed her true self: a power-crazed careerist prepared to throw under the bus anything and anyone that might threaten her grip on the keys to Bute House.

If there’s ever another independence referendum – and we see no prospect of one in the next decade at least – Sturgeon and her Green hench[persons] will already have turned Scotland into a grotesque, intolerant, science-denying authoritarian hell, where all protest is deemed a hate crime and biological women are third-class citizens forbidden from mentioning the fact of their own sex.

£884,841 [The total amount of money Wings raised since 2013]

Last weekend marked seven years since the indyref – the period effectively stipulated as a “generation”…by the Good Friday Agreement [LOL]. That the SNP, which held another stage-managed fake online “conference” this month, hasn’t bothered with even a token attempt to highlight this significant fact in a full week, let alone take any action over it, tells you everything about the party’s current attitude towards independence.

Meanwhile, among those who are still actively focused on independence an alarming number of people are openly calling for a blood-and-soil voting franchise should another indyref ever happen, a truly terrible idea I want no part of.

A section of the movement appears to be retreating into kilts-and-bagpipes-and-Gaelic cultural nationalism…that predated the SNP’s electoral success and gives the average voter the pure heebs every bit as much as Sturgeon’s rainbow-haired sturmjugend [Hitler Youth] do.

Independence would also bankrupt the SNP, which is currently wholly dependent on Westminster money to balance its books. Even with that Short Money the party is wildly profligate and has totally inadequate reserves with which to fight a referendum’.

What the party HAS focused on, and largely achieved, is to ruthlessly crush the non-SNP indy movement by constantly attacking and undermining it.

The Hope Over Fear rally in Glasgow a week ago drew less than a couple of hundred people where it used to get thousands. A showpiece “debate” in Edinburgh this week was an impossibly depressing affair.

And if we’re talking about embarrassing, the state of The National is making us long for the days when there were no pro-indy newspapers.

We agree: If you haven’t already, please sign and share our petition to urge Newsquest and Gannett to stop publishing The National’s anti-English hate.

The SNP now has the Yes movement exactly where it wants it – dispirited, apathetic and divided, with nowhere to put its faint and battered hopes but a centrist neoliberal party which is safely ensconced at both Westminster and Holyrood. with no elections due for years, and is far more interested in consolidating its own power, and the cult of identity politics and Queer Theory, than in independence.

In the comments, the Reverend responded to this comment…

Everyone who supports Scottish independence has some vague notion of Scottishness that they think is important enough to warrant distinction and important enough to pursue politically. Otherwise, what’s the point?

..with his motivation…

I don’t. I think we’re a country, marked by a line on a map like every other country, and that fact in and of itself should mean we’re entitled to choose our own governments. No more and no less.
Are lines on maps arbitrary? Perhaps, but they’re how we’ve organised the world for millennia and until such times as we have a one-world government they’re what we’ve got.