Wings Over Scotland

Wings has backed Ash Regan in the SNP leadership election, because she’s the only one with an actual plan for independence and the only one who doesn’t immediately start talking about something else if you bring the subject up.

But until this morning we’d regarded Kate Forbes as a decent consolation prize – no plan for indy, but at least someone who’d lead to the withdrawal of the toxic Scottish Greens from government and probably a mass exodus of the SNP’s Twitler Youth, leaving the party in a better place to rebuild for the future.

And after her disappointing chickening-out from the vote on the Gender Recognition Reform bill, we’d been impressed at the fortitude she’d shown by carrying on in the contest after the (justifiable) furore around her views on abortion and equal marriage, and her combative showing in Tuesday night’s STV debate.

But this footage from last night’s hustings in Johnstone is incredibly disturbing.

Erin Lux, the co-convener of the extremist SNP affiliate Out For Independence, is the ultra-woke Canadian activist who tried to have Forbes kicked out of the election for “transphobia” almost as soon as she’d declared her candidacy.

OFI, whose membership is measured in dozens, has a disproportionate influence on policy but a microscopic percentage of votes in the election. The chances of any of its members ever voting for Kate Forbes under any circumstances are less than nil. She could have waded into the crowd and decapitated Lux with a chainsaw for all the difference it would have made to the number of votes she’s going to get from OFI.

But Forbes still folded like a deckchair in a hurricane.

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The great unknown in the SNP leadership contest is an extremely significant one: who are the voters? Nobody but Peter Murrell really knows how many members the party has, but almost nobody believes the claimed number of over 100,000. (Our guess, based on pretty much nothing but a gut feeling, is 75,000 plus or minus 5000.)

But more to the point, nobody knows who they are. The average member age in most political parties is over 50, and according to figures published in 2019, more than 80% of SNP members are over 40, with half of those being over 60. There’s also an almost 3:2 bias in favour of men.

So the sample on Newsnight last night was pretty representative.

And the segment illustrated the difficulty in predicting the result of the contest.

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Humza Yousaf will not be the next First Minister of Scotland. We’re calling it now. His trainwreck of a performance on last night’s leadership election debate on STV dealt a blow to his chances that we can’t see him recovering from, and the SNP establishment is now under such intense scrutiny over the electoral process that the chances of a fix being orchestrated by Peter Murrell are receding fast.

In the debate Yousaf declared that Nicola Sturgeon was the best politician in the UK, that he wasn’t as good as her, and that she’d failed to find a successful strategy for independence and therefore he couldn’t either.

So, um, that’s that, we suppose.

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It’s all about the D, readers.

If you’re talking about “transwomen”, you’re almost always talking about people with a fully intact and functional penis. More than 95% of people who identify as trans have NOT undergone any genital surgery, and that’s a fact that’s still not widely understood.

So in our most recent and double-size Panelbase poll we made it explicit that we were referring to people with a full set of man-junk, and the results speak for themselves.

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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.

“We’re working with GCHQ on the election.”

We don’t know about you, folks, but we’re not all that reassured.

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Let’s take a moment off, folks. In our latest Panelbase poll, we also threw in a question just for fun, with genuinely no agenda at all, simply because we were curious to know what the answer was. Here it is:

Some of the detail, though, might intrigue you.

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By now many of you will have seen last night’s article on Craig Murray’s site, in which a current SNP branch convener revealed how the party machine is setting fire to all its own rules in a desperate attempt to secure the succession of Humza Yousaf.

Yousaf is the party establishment’s last hope of keeping all of its misdeeds in the last few years under wraps, and realising the magnitude of what’s at stake if he loses to Ash Regan or Kate Forbes, they’re abandoning all pretence of neutrality or integrity and throwing everything they’ve got at getting him elected.

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Last month Wings broke a story about a “survey” being conducted by dozens of primary schools in the Aberdeen area in which children as young as nine were being asked about their sexual orientation and “gender identity”.

After we revealed it and national press picked up the story, the survey was swiftly pulled by the city council, but it’s only one example of primary children across Scotland (and elsewhere) being indoctrinated with the concept of gender ideology.

So in our latest Panelbase poll we thought we’d ask what voters thought about it.

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The charity LGBT Youth Scotland is currently the subject of a live police investigation over its involvement in a second major child-abuse scandal in little over a decade.

So you’d expect Police Scotland to be taking that pretty seriously, right?

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BBC NEWS: [abysmal, unprofessional disgrace to broadcasting]

ITV NEWS: Hold our beer!

(Still not deleted/fixed seven hours later.)

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Wings Over Scotland has been monitoring the BBC’s coverage of Scottish politics for over 11 years now, readers, and other than The Nick Robinson Incident we’re honestly struggling to remember seeing anything worse than this.

The Corporation’s “coverage” of Ash Regan’s campaign launch for the SNP leadership election ran for roughly seven minutes. And we suppose we should be grateful that it did at one point feature a brief, incidental cameo appearance from Ash Regan.

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