(Although we’re not sure how “new followers” is being calculated there. We actually have more than 500 extra followers since 8pm – we can only assume that it’s only counting those who right-clicked and followed from that specific tweet.)
And part of the reason is that it’s plain that almost nobody knew about the report, even though it came out three months ago (when Wings was still in retirement). We had to dig deep to find any media coverage of it at all, and what there was was cursory at best, and sometimes a lot worse.
It was already quite bold/crass to equate “letting rapists change their legal sex so their victim has to refer to them as ‘she’ in court” with the life’s work of Nelson Mandela.
But the punchline was still a chef’s kiss to treasure.
Facebook is essentially unsearchable (which in itself is a pretty good reason not to trust anyone who does the majority of their work on it), and even when we went to the Believe In Scotland page and scrolled down and down and down and down for an eternity, it was impossible to find.
But eventually we had a brainwave and searched the site’s pictures for the one used in the Express and found the post. He really said it. And it needs some examination.
The SNP have been all over the place since Wednesday’s judgement of the Supreme Court. Astonishingly, the party hadn’t prepared an agreed line in the event of the Court ruling against it, with the result that various party figures had popped up with all sorts of different versions of what a supposed plebiscite election would mean.
Let’s get straight to the point: this is a straight-up categorical lie.
Since Wednesday’s events there’s been a lot of chatter and confusion on social media about whether the Scottish Government has the ability to trigger a snap Holyrood election and use it as a de facto plebiscite on independence.
The short answer, as we told you yesterday, is “officially no, in practice yes”. But that needs a bit of further explanation, so as usual let’s do the job of actual journalism that nobody else in Scotland can apparently be bothered to.
As a rule I try not to respond to the literally dozens of deranged attacks on this site that are posted by James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, but I really dislike being called a liar so I’m going to take a moment for this one.
James appears to have taken extraordinary offence to a two-paragraph stats post I put up to mark Wings’ 11th birthday this week, and has written two purple-faced rants about it. So for the record’s sake I’m going to comply with his demand as best I can.
Honestly, readers, swear to God, all joking and sarcasm aside, when we saw this tweet yesterday we were wondering how on Earth some clever satirist had managed to hack Anas Sarwar’s account to insert the screenshot into it.
Because we didn’t believe that even Scottish Labour’s low-watt-bulb of a branch manager would willingly post something that made him look so much of an imbecile.
Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.
The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.