Since you’d barely know that Ash Regan existed from reading or watching the Scottish media, here’s a chance to get to know her a little bit better before voting opens in the SNP leadership election tomorrow.
We’ve been telling you for quite some time now that after eight wasted years of doing absolutely nothing with endless mandates, the SNP establishment want to back away from the party’s defining goal of Scottish independence and settle in for some lovely cosy lifelong careers at Westminster and in the devolved Holyrood, with well-paid staffer jobs for all their pals, followed by tidy £50,000-a-year pensions.
Maybe some of you didn’t believe us.
Maybe you could have another think about it.
In fairness, you can’t really accuse them of hiding it any more.
The faint hearts and pension-seekers of the SNP think that their time has come – the moment when the party’s pursuit of independence can be quietly downgraded to a vague long-term aspiration that will ensure their seats on the gravy train for decades.
Starting at noon tomorrow is your very last chance to stop them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
