Paper Review: "It will be war" between SNP and Wings Party

Nicola Sturgeon is just the latest SNP politician to underline a rift from mainstream Scottish nationalism and the internet fringe. But opinion-writers remain fascinated with how Ms Sturgeon will see off a potential political party inspired by the nation’s most controversial blogger.

The Times

It was a Times columnist Kenny Farquharson, who first uncovered tentative plans by Stuart Campbell of the Wings Over Scotland blog to set up an alternative pro-independence party to the SNP. “The reaction of SNP folk of my acquaintance was near panic,” Mr Farquharson wrote in today’s paper. A Wings Party might, conceded the veteran watcher of Scottish politics, exploit fault lines within the wider Yes movement - doing the kind of damage to the SNP that the Brexit Party has done to the Tories. But Mr Farquharson does not expect Ms Sturgeon to tack to the fringe to keep would-be Wings supporters on board. “I cannot see how with any credibility encourage support for a party so at odds with her strategy on independence. There would be no cosy relationship between the SNP and Wings. It would be war and quite right too.”

READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon: Anti-English nationalists 'not welcome in SNP'

Brexit continues to animate newspaper commentators like nothing quite else.

The National

Over at The Herald’s sister paper Kevin McKenna sets out a dystopian tongue-in-cheek vision of a no-deal Brexit.

“As the supermarket shelves empty there would be a need for massive food depots in out-of-town locations where poor families can exchange ration tokens.” Mr McKenna (we hope) joked. “ Why not make a sport out of this? Each neighbourhood could provide teams of local champions on motorbikes with spiked wheels. “They would all choose from a regulated list of chibs and then fight to the death as they roared round the food shelves seeking to feed their communities.

“The losing towns and villages would lose all their entitlements until the next game. Only the fittest and the hungriest would survive, thus removing at a stroke loads of benefit recipients and their families during a period when the UK economy is facing its greatest test.”

READ MORE: Ireland's Simon Coveney insists EU will not be 'steam-rolled' by Boris Johnson into scrapping backstop

The Guardian

There are people who think Brexit can be stopped. Rafael Behr is not one of them. It is coming down the tracks in the way World War One, as historian AJP Taylor put it, was determined by railway timetables.

Mr Behr wrote: “Even with a century of hindsight it is impossible to discern a point of no return, a junction at which all future paths, by whatever gradient or circuitous route, converged on disaster.

“If history doesn’t afford that view, how are we to know in real time when such a moment is close, or has been passed?

Sometimes a weight of bad choices already made presses down on politicians, driving them deeper into an error that they see plainly enough.”

Mr Behr was more serious but just as terrifying as Mr McKenna.

“Zoom out still further, and Brexit could look like the prelude to a wider unravelling,” he said. “If the European project is rattled by financial crisis and fractured by vandalistic nationalism, the debate will be whether Britain was wise to get out when it did, or criminal in failing to stay at the critical juncture.

“One side will celebrate Brexit as a heroic leap from the fire escape, the other will deplore it as the arsonist spark that ignited an inferno.”

Proposals to raise the old age pension age to 75 are still exasperating Scottish columnists.

The Daily Record

Annie Brown has a long history of giving voice to the worst off in our society. Today she uses her column to underline just who has the most to lose from pension reform.

She said: “In Glasgow, the average male life expectancy is 73, and 78 for females.

“To suggest that working to 75 is healthy is not true for the vast majority of people, many of whom are in physically and psychologically demanding jobs.

“I am in the age range affected by this proposal and already have spells of being knackered and my job is cushy compared to a binman or a waitress.”

“It’s fantasy to suggest an employer would even want a glut of older workers when we live in an institutionally ageist society.”