Wings Over Scotland

…on Good Morning Scotland yesterday, then we suspect you’re going to love the Lib Dems’ heroically glaikit MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton on the same show today.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 March 2017)
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Our favourite line is probably “the SNP didn’t win an election”, although it’s run quite close by “If you listen to Christine Jardine”.

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Ever since May 2007, one of the strangest aspects of Scottish politics has been the poisonous hostility of the Scottish Liberal Democrats to the SNP. The parties sit very close to each other on the political spectrum, and the SNP are sympathetic to some key Lib Dem policies – most obviously a local income tax – which the Lib Dems stood no chance of implementing in coalition with anyone but the nationalists.

(The Lib Dems are also still officially a party of federalism, committed to far stronger devolution than Labour or the Tories.)

Yet a succession of leaders have treated the SNP as little short of pure evil. Nicol Stephen, Tavish Scott (especially) and now Willie Rennie appear to regard Alex Salmond’s party with undisguised hatred, for no immediately obvious reason, and the idea of any sort of co-operation on any issue about as unthinkable as Barack Obama announcing a treaty of friendship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In this site’s view, that approach was at least as responsible for the Scottish Lib Dems’ humiliation in 2011 as the UK party’s Westminster coalition with the Conservatives. Most people had expected the Lib Dems to form a coalition with the SNP in 2007, and when they refused we suspect that middle-ground Scottish voters no longer saw the party as serving any sort of practical purpose.

But the reduction of the Scottish Lib Dems to a tiny, embarrassing rump of just five MSPs, without a single constituency on the entire Scottish mainland, has given them a useful role in the service of the anti-independence campaign: that of cannon fodder.

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Dear Willie, since you're implausibly still peddling this ridiculous fantasy hypothetical, perhaps you could quickly answer a similar one for us. It won't take a moment.

In a two-question 1999-style referendum of the sort you posit in your zany "99-51" scenario, the vote in autumn 2014 instead delivers the following outcome:

In favour of the status quo: 2%
In favour of devo-max: 98%
In favour of independence: 97%

So has Scotland just rejected independence, despite 97% of the electorate voting for it? By your logic it has. Is that seriously your position? With a straight face and everything? Are you going to be the one to tell the 97% of Scots who've just voted to leave the UK that they're staying in whether they like it or not?

If not, please shush with your daft, embarrassing haverings. But if so, we'll wish you the very best of luck with that. And then, if it's all the same to you, we'll run for cover.

The Indian Council of Scotland and the Muslim Council of the United Kingdom have this morning issued an extraordinary joint statement regarding their serious concerns about the SNP leadership contest. We reproduce it below at their request.

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More than a day on from our disturbing exposé of how the Scottish Parliament has been captured by a tiny, sleazy nest of pornographers, drug addicts, fetishists and abusers, there still hasn’t been a single comment distancing themselves from the group by any of the MSPs identified in the article, including Patrick Harvie, Ross Greer, Joe Fitzpatrick, Paul Sweeney and most notably Alex Cole-Hamilton, who made the remarkable public statement that MSPs were directly and specifically passing gender reform laws for the benefit of male sex worker and violent serial abuser Beth Douglas.

We’ve asked Alex Cole-Hamilton for comment several times without reply. (Although there has been an unverified third-hand answer via Willie Rennie and a Twitter user.)

Wings Over Scotland makes absolutely no assertions about why MSPs wouldn’t want to very clearly and unambiguously disassociate themselves from such an unpleasant character after information about him had been brought to light in a widely-read (over 200,000 views) article which was trending on Twitter all day yesterday.

For the avoidance of doubt, we have no information about any interactions between Douglas and any MSPs that we’re keeping secret. But we’re not the least bit surprised that people have started wondering what possible reasons a whole string of male politicians could have for not wanting to upset a male prostitute, particularly given the long and sordid history of male politicians and male prostitutes in the UK.

To quash such speculation, we once again urge all MSPs who have associated with Beth Douglas to clearly and publicly disavow him and assure voters that he will no longer shape or influence legislation passed in the Scottish Parliament.

Last night this happened.

The events marked simply and unquestionably the most shameful and contemptible moment in the history of the Scottish Parliament since 1707.

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We’d actually planned to leave Chris Cairns’ fabulous cartoon at the top of the front page all day today, but this post is important so we’re putting it in here again (no, Chris, you don’t get paid twice) so we can say this.

Because no matter how much you hate the Unionist parties or certain of their individual MSPs, if you want Alba MSPs elected today there are several seats where you really, really can’t afford to vote SNP on the constituency ballot.

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When the Faculty Of Advocates – the most senior body of lawyers/QCs in the country – is handing out barely-veiled smackdowns like this to the First Minister, then you know you’re in some pretty uncharted jungle.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland is a rogue state.

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Yeah, we know, that could be a really long article. But we have a specific thing in mind.

Over the last few days, Jo Swinson and Willie Rennie have both endured toe-curling interviews trying to defend the comically-indefensible hypocrisy of the party’s positions on Brexit and independence.

(If you haven’t been following, official policy now is that a Lib Dem election win is a clear and unimpeachable mandate to carry out their manifesto promises, but an SNP election win isn’t a mandate to carry out theirs.)

But it’s not the mere crass, transparent hypocrisy that makes them stupid.

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Willie Rennie in the Daily Record today:

And to be absolutely fair to the Scottish Lib Dem leader, he’s always been consistent in his beliefs, such as the view that elected members should be given a second chance when they’ve committed a minor misdemeanour, and NOT have to (for example) stand down and face re-election.

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The front page of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

The problem: it’s completely and utterly made up.

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We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!

At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.

And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.

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