Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.
So let’s see the final scores on the doors.
This is the second time Wings Over Scotland has asked Police Scotland a question through the proper official channels, only to read the response in the tabloid press before we’d heard it firsthand (which we still haven’t, incidentally, several days after the 28-day deadline expired).
But the sidebar piece in today’s Sunday Mail raises more questions than it answers.
Wait what now?
And how would he know that, exactly?
We’ve been thinking about it since last night, and we’re not sure if Humza Yousaf now still has ANY of the policies he started the leadership election with.
But this one‘s got us extra-specially perplexed, since at the start it was pretty much the main unique selling point he was hanging his whole campaign on.
Maybe you can help us out, readers.
According to SNP President and acting CEO Mike Russell, SNP members are too thick to understand the concept of changing their vote, and integrity is “disruptive”.
We’re not very clear on why a revote would be susceptible to “hacking” in any way that the original vote isn’t, but we’re sure there’s a great explanation.
There can surely be no credible disputing that the SNP leadership election – and therefore that of Scotland’s next First Minister – is, to put it very mildly, under a cloud.
The list of let’s call them “irregularities” is almost endless. The artificial truncation of the contest, against the SNP constitution; the packing of the hustings with Humza Yousaf supporters; candidates being denied any knowledge about the size of the membership until voting was under way, and then the party’s press chief and CEO both resigning over lying about it; the apparent existence of 6000 more ballot papers than the party has members; one of the Scottish Government’s most senior officers being improperly seconded to the Yousaf campaign (and then also resigning as a result); numerous documented examples of non-members being given votes while fully-paid-up members weren’t; we could, frankly, go on and on.
As things stand, whoever wins will be forever tainted by the process – easy meat for the Unionist opposition in the Holyrood chamber and the media and a potential legal challenge could cause untold further damage to the party.
With six days still left for voting, the case for a reballot – an administratively fairly trivial task in an election being conducted almost entirely online – is now unanswerable, and needn’t even involve a delay.
Only one person stands in the way.
So we were a couple of days early on this one.
In fairness to the Scottish press, it’s had a lot of stuff to fit in recently.
The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.
It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.
You might think that Scottish political journalists would all be in a shark-like frenzy of excitement at the events of the last few days. But not over on The Guardian.
Apparently it’s all a bit too much for the delicate wee flowers.
We’ve just been leaked this footage, apparently taken by an alert traveller, of Nicola Sturgeon at Edinburgh Airport, reacting badly to receiving news that Peter Murrell has been “unavoidably detained” and won’t be making their rendezvous to Rio.
So what now, readers? What now?
The mainstream Scottish political media might not have many professional standards, but there’s one it’s still pretty diligent about upholding.
And that’s that if a political party’s press office starts really taking liberties and making them look like fools, all bets (and gloves) are off.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
