Wings Over Scotland

Let’s take a passing moment just to reflect on how grotesque this is.

When she was leader, Sturgeon forced MPs and MSPs like Michelle Thomson and Mark McDonald – neither of whom were even spoken to by police, let alone arrested or questioned or charged – out of the SNP lest even the mere suggestion of wrongdoing bring shame on the party.

She is still under police investigation on suspicion of EMBEZZLING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF POUNDS FROM THE SNP, and her husband and former party CEO has actually been charged with it. She is personally on record, on video, ordering the NEC not to question the state of party finances at the time of the alleged offences.

Yet not only has she had the lack of class not to resign the whip voluntarily, not only has she shown no interest in turning up and doing the job for the last two years, but she’s actually put herself forward to stand again, and doddering, spineless caretaker John Swinney hasn’t had the stones to put a stop to it.

Nobody thinks she’s even going to actually run next year – she spends most of her time gallivanting around celebrity events talking about her life after politics – so she’s just wasting everyone’s time and trolling.

Nobody in history has ever taken the SNP for a ride as cynically as this. But the party is so rotten and broken and weak that it just meekly goes along with it, and yet still dares to pretend it’s up to the rather tougher task of making Scotland independent.

We have no words for anyone still stupid enough to believe in it.

This is the SNP’s latest messaging. Ministers, MSPs, payroll drones and the central party account were all tweeting the graphic and variations on the line yesterday.

And it’s quite difficult even just to count the number of different ways in which it’s not just mind-bogglingly offensive, but also clatteringly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

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It’s a well-known truism that if a newspaper headline is phrased as a question, the answer to that question is always “No”.

And nothing’s changed here.

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It’s worth remembering that they didn’t have to do this.

Labour had already announced their intention to abstain. There was no danger of the budget being defeated. So the SNP could have allocated however much money they wanted from their increased funding to the pursuit of independence.

And maybe they did.

People sometimes ask us if we get bored of being right all the time.

But in truth, we just wish we had to work a bit harder at it.

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Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.

You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).

We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.

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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.

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The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.

It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.

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Way back in the day, the Lib Dems in particular, but also other parties and the “Better Together” campaign, were infamous for the “dodgy barchart” tactic.

And so degraded is the modern SNP, it’s now scraping the same barrel.

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In the recent US election, the Democrats made a huge play out of the notion that the very concept of democracy itself was at risk if Donald Trump won.

And yet his eventual victory was unquestionably democratic. Not only did Trump win under the electoral college system by a huge 312-226 margin, and secure control of both the Senate and the House Of Representatives, he also beat Kamala Harris in the popular vote, by 50% to 48%. By every possible count and measure, Trump was the legitimate winner and has a clear mandate to govern for the next four years.

Over in the UK, however, things aren’t quite so neat and tidy.

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Peter Murrell really ought to have seen the writing on the wall a while ago.

But at least it’s in keeping with her track record.

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Y’know, maybe we were a little harsh on the lads at Holyrood Sources yesterday when we implied that a more direct and aggressive interviewing style might have cut through John Swinney and Kate Forbes’ pathetically feeble waffling evasion on the SNP’s lack of an independence strategy in their recent podcast.

But the closest thing (along with Colin Mackay at STV) that the Scottish media has left to a proper Rottweiler interviewer – Peter Adam Smith of ITV – had a shot at that five years ago and didn’t do any better.

Smith noted that even back in 2019 Nicola Sturgeon had been droning on about how Westminster’s refusal to grant a second indy referendum was “unsustainable” for two years already. But no matter how hard he pressed, Sturgeon just kept on glibly and smugly insisting that they’d concede.

“The UK government strategy is to say no. Do you have a way around it?”

“My strategy is to say yes.” [smirks]

Readers might be forgiven for wondering how long it’s going to take the SNP to accept that that “strategy” is a failure, if seven years and three First Ministers isn’t enough for them to have worked it out. But as long as the pathologically gullible keep voting for them anyway, we suppose they have no reason to.