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?
Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.
Last night the Labour MSP James Kelly – who was resoundingly rejected by voters in Rutherglen earlier this month but was forced on the Scottish Parliament anyway by his party – appeared on Scotland Tonight to debate the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act. You can see the full segment from 15m 35s here.
Mr Kelly told a number of quite serious lies. We’ve edited them together.
Let’s examine them in turn.
We’re stuck indoors waiting for a repairman today, so we had a little read-around of some of the less popular Scottish politics blogs to pass the time, and noted this:
James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, which we gather from its front page was seemingly one of the “Top 50 Left-Wing Blogs of 2011”, is noticeably insistent on making the argument that we’re “stalking” and “obsessed” with him.
So as we do, we thought we’d check the facts.
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.
Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.
Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.
This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.
And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.
We are, as always, absolutely enthralled at the prospect of discovering from James Kelly what our vile secret masterplan has been over the last 18 months.
So we, at least, will be reading, James.
It’s always nice to hear from the SNP/Green youth wing first thing in the morning.
Stay tuned for lots more Gentile-obsessed hetro TERF monkey antics, readers!
Today is going to be by some distance the quietest one in Scottish politics this week, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. Because while I just ignore unimaginably vast torrents of online abuse every hour of every day of every year, once in a blue moon some things get said that you just can’t let pass.
Paul Kavanagh made a lot of unpleasant personal-attack tweets yesterday off the back of an unpleasant personal-attack article on his blog, which I don’t propose to get into the many individual falsehoods and misrepresentations of here.
(While I believe his evidence in the Dugdale case actually did more harm than good, I don’t hold him responsible for that and I appreciated his willingness to try to help when others I’d considered friends had turned their back.)
But the comments above are too much to bear.
Hoo boy. Here we go again.
So, for the historical record: I have no belief whatsoever, earnest or otherwise, that I can get rid of Nicola Sturgeon in the next four months.
I’m an idiot with a website. I have no power. I haven’t been elected to anything and I’m not the commander of an army. Information to which I’m privy would get me put in jail if I published it, and would in itself have no power to remove Nicola Sturgeon anyway. The only people who can bring that about between now and May are Sturgeon herself or, collectively, the Scottish Parliament.
This site has for some time called for Sturgeon to resign because it is our belief that she’s going to have to anyway, on account of events over which we have no control or influence. Because of that it would be the responsible and conscientious thing for her to quit early enough that the SNP/independence movement had a chance to deal with the issue of her succession and regroup in plenty of time for this May’s election.
The remaining window of opportunity for that to happen is now getting very narrow. And the enemies of independence will be beside themselves with delight about it.
We’ve been having a closer look at the latest polling for next year’s Holyrood election (YouGov, from this week), and in particular the list numbers. We thought you might be interested in a little stat from them.
That’s the full breakdown. But that’s not the graphic that really tells the story.
Alert readers may have noticed that the hypothetical Wings list party is once again the talk of the steamie, with the usual suspects stamping their feet and pouting about it yet again on social media, in particular the firmly-ensconced SNP MP Pete Wishart and the worryingly obsessed former poll-analysis website WINGS OVER SCOTLAND IS BAD AND TERRIBLE AND STUART CAMPBELL SOMETIMES DOES SWEARS SO NOBODY WOULD EVER VOTE FOR HIM! Goes Pop.
(We’re not sure where this sudden outbreak of 18th-century Puritanism about Scottish people using colourful language has come from, to be honest. It seems the weirdest and least plausible grounds for objection imaginable in a country that’s literally world-famous for its enthusiastic embrace of swearing, but *shrug*.)
The trigger was a bizarre piece in yesterday’s Courier (also picked up by the National, the Evening Express and others). They phoned us last week ostensibly to talk about a new website set up by a bunch of loony Unionist zoomers who with amusingly ironic timing have named themselves “The Majority”, and whether we thought they’d have any impact or be able to attract funding.
We chatted perfectly amiably to the reporter for several minutes on the subject, so we were quite surprised when the story that eventually appeared didn’t contain a single mention of them, and instead was solely about the Wings party, which he’d also asked us a couple of “Oh, by the way, while I’m here”-type questions about.
So let’s just clarify a couple of things for the record (again).
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
