Wings Over Scotland

Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

So there it is. In a massive, humiliating and abrupt reverse, the Scottish Greens have announced that they’ll support the Scottish Government – still led for the foreseeable future by Humza Yousaf – in this week’s confidence motion.

Shockingly enough, the debate about the Greens’ principles, intellectual consistency and integrity was an extremely brief one. Faced with the loss of their relevance and influence, they crumbled like month-old carrot cake and rushed their cards onto the table before the SNP had time to do any thinking.

Any hope Kate Forbes might have had of leading the SNP just evaporated, and so did any hope of grown-up government between now and 2026. The SNP will now spend the next two years as pathetic, grovelling puppets, doing whatever the Greens want as long as the paycheques and pension contributions keep rolling in.

It’s a tragic demise for a party that just a couple of years ago still crushed all before it in Scottish politics. But that’s showbiz, folks.

Thanks to the dedication of our legal team in working over the Easter holiday, Wings has unexpectedly received the formal Opinion of legal counsel (hereafter called “the Opinion”, capitalised to avoid confusion with the ordinary use of the word in the article) with regard to the standing of the site in the light of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which comes into force tomorrow.

We publish the Opinion below, partly to assist those worried about the Act’s impact on them but unable to afford their own legal advice.

But we also do so to place Police Scotland on notice that anything published by Wings Over Scotland is done in the light of the greatest possible care having been taken to ensure compliance with the law, and that in such a context any future attempt/s to improperly interfere with our rights of free expression under Article 10 of the European Convention On Human Rights (ECHR) will be viewed with regard to pursuing the maximum available recourse for wrongful restriction of our lawful activities.

We have both funds and the will to pursue such action.

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With the shock defection of Ash Regan from the SNP to Alba last week, followed by councillor Chris Cullen, Alex Salmond’s party now has representation at every level of Scottish politics – Westminster, Holyrood and local.

But it still awaits a mass breakthrough, either in politicians crossing the floor or in the polls. In the meantime the SNP is plunging to new lows, recording just 32% in two polls last week, one of which saw them trailing six points behind Scottish Labour.

It seems reasonable to assume that the SNP’s fall is going to continue, with lots more bad news looming in its future – Operation Branchform, the likely humiliating loss of the Section 35 challenge in the wake of Lady Dorrian’s judgement this week, the ongoing ferries and trams inquiries and now the already-damaging COVID inquiry.

The party and its media cheerleaders are pumping out increasingly desperate “please don’t leave us” messaging, ironically only drawing attention to its stricken state.

So the future of the political side of the independence movement appears to be very much up for grabs and open to debate. With that in mind, Wings sat down by Zoom with Ash Regan to quiz her about where she saw it going.

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After months of phony war, we’re actually about to find out something concrete about the current state of Scottish politics.

The omens aren’t massively auspicious.

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I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.

They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.

There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:

(Warning: some adult content.)

Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.

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The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.

Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.

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We must admit it’s a shock – we were expecting the SNP President to remain neutral in the leadership election – but it’s hard to reasonably interpret this any other way.

(We’re not aware of Russell giving any media interviews last night so we assume from the timing that these comments were made at the regular meeting of the SNP Westminster Parliamentary group.)

Because both Humza Yousaf and Kate Forbes couldn’t have been any clearer that their indy strategies centre on getting Westminster to agree to another Section 30 order, and by pointing out that that’s never going to happen (which we all knew anyway), Mike Russell is admitting that a vote for anyone but Ash Regan is a vote to surrender any hope of independence for the foreseeable future.

We don’t often agree with him these days, but on this one he couldn’t be more right. For the sake of the SNP (and the Yes movement) we hope its members heed the sage, albeit coded, advice of their President.

It’s remarkable how openly a certain faction of the SNP is now declaring surrender.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the events of the next few days and weeks will not just determine the future of the independence movement, but whether in any meaningful, practical sense it continues to exist at all.

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One of the most memorable lectures I had as an undergraduate student at university was on Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros”, a defining work of the Theatre Of The Absurd genre. It is both a timeless and timely text, on a par with 1984 or The Crucible.

During the opening scene, the everyman protagonist Berenger sits having coffee with a friend. Midway through their conversation, a rhino charges past the café. Berenger is startled and concerned but his friend seems unperturbed, in denial that they even saw a rhinoceros.

Throughout the rest of the play, Berenger watches in incredulity and terror as, one by one, every person around him, colleagues and friends, transform into rhinoceroses, the cause seemingly being part-infection, part-capitulation.

In the final scene, he stands at his window looking out over the carnage, and in a moment of desperation, tries to force himself to transform into a rhinoceros. Despite his efforts, he is unable to and upon regaining his senses, vows in a hopeless frenzy that he will never capitulate.

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15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

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THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

Chapter I
Ignorance Is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered.

Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.

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