While idly browsing Twitter this morning, we made a startling discovery triggered by the SNP leadership election, and it was this: nobody in Scotland really knows what the nation’s law on abortion is.
It was prompted by these two tweets, both of which appear to be true:
The thing they agree on is that Humza Yousaf has just declared that he wants to change the law around abortion so that women can abort babies in Scotland solely on the grounds that they don’t like which sex they are. And that seems like something that should probably be bigger news.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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”.
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?
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “You get it! The only flaw I can see in the entire scheme, and it’s a flaw of infinitesimal probability,…” Jun 15, 21:10
Southernbystander on Response Level Upgrade: “Especially if nearly all the players were English. It cannot fail as it would unite virtually every Scot on the…” Jun 15, 20:34
Mark Beggan on Response Level Upgrade: “@Hatey You’ve been hanging around with the wrong people.” Jun 15, 19:40
Mark Beggan on Response Level Upgrade: “It’s all unraveling. One step at a time.” Jun 15, 19:22
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “I don’t think you’re getting it, Mark. It may seem counter intuitive, but any Scot determined on Indy should be…” Jun 15, 19:20
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “But she’s already forgotten doing it.” Jun 15, 19:15
Mark Beggan on Response Level Upgrade: “Nicola Sturgeon has changed her pronouns to Him not Me.” Jun 15, 18:53
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “Perhaps not immediate. Let’s get the World Cup over with first.” Jun 15, 18:47
Mark Beggan on Response Level Upgrade: “They tried that with Team GB, went down like a Tranny in woman’s changing room.” Jun 15, 17:23
agentx on Response Level Upgrade: “After the Court decision today there should be an IMMEDIATE BAN ON GAY COUPLES adopting children.” Jun 15, 17:21
Confused on Response Level Upgrade: “Much as I have no interest in the rosbifs winning anything, I know a bit (too much) about english football;…” Jun 15, 17:10
Ebok on Response Level Upgrade: “Service Adviser 19(89)84(7)? SNP left me in 2016 and has done so to ever increasing numbers of its members since…” Jun 15, 16:47
Spartan 117 on Response Level Upgrade: “I also played midfield briefly in my 20s, for whatever relevance that is. I’ve nothing against Fitba’ and wish our…” Jun 15, 15:30
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “The “cup marks” the Picts left on their sacred and symbolic liths were pictorial representations of winning set piece tactics.…” Jun 15, 14:59
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “If you’re saying that Scottish culture consists of cash-strapped Scots scrimping and doing without to richly reward prima donnas, their…” Jun 15, 14:51
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “Good one, Northy. Football is like politics right enough. A zero sum game. One side is victorious, the other is…” Jun 15, 14:35
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: “How many years (and how many World Cups) is it since I twigged that your typical self-identifying Indy supporter would…” Jun 15, 14:27
Southernbystander on Response Level Upgrade: “The English stopped believing the England team are just an underachieving heavyweight long, long before 2014, like when the team…” Jun 15, 14:27
Northcode on Response Level Upgrade: “Albert Einstein (yes, really) — played as a youth in Munich Einstein wasn’t a competitive player, but he did play…” Jun 15, 14:17
Hatey McHateface on Response Level Upgrade: ““The Scottish accent is the most trusted in the world” Of course, it can only be trusted where it is…” Jun 15, 14:14
Alf Baird on Response Level Upgrade: “All you folks seek to do is de-base Scottish culture. But we know, ‘that is how colonialism works, by de-basing…” Jun 15, 14:12
Captain Caveman on Response Level Upgrade: “Yawn. More verbose, witless, irrelevant drivel. My original comment stands. You bore me beyond belief.” Jun 15, 14:05
Northcode on Response Level Upgrade: “Aye, Confused, there’s a fair bit of clutchery goes on in this place at times. This: “Football is a politico-philosophical…” Jun 15, 14:03
sam on Response Level Upgrade: “In the national Library of Scotland – “Forty years of Shite: The Complete and Utter Awfulness of the England Football…” Jun 15, 13:44
Northcode on Response Level Upgrade: ““Gah, you’re such a witless troll, Northcode…” Gah… the sound of an Anglo’s patience snapping like a twig (a point…” Jun 15, 13:30
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Response Level Upgrade: “Thanks, Cynicus. Greatly appreciated.” Jun 15, 13:11
Cynicus on Response Level Upgrade: “Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh says: 14 June, 2026 at 12:24 am If “even Homer sometimes nods” (recent exchange on Wings thread), then…” Jun 15, 12:43
Captain Caveman on Response Level Upgrade: “Gah, you’re such a witless troll, Northcode, you’re not even remotely good at it. Deliberately misquoting someone..? Lawks! Anyone would…” Jun 15, 12:41