Wings Over Scotland

Sadly, this turned out to be prescient this morning.

Laura Kuenssberg did give Nicola Sturgeon an uncomfortable time in their interview on her Sunday programme on BBC News, but when confronted with the one gaping open goal that Sturgeon has no answer for – and even when Sturgeon TWICE set it up on a plate for her – Kuenssberg failed to knock the ball into the empty net.

That doesn’t – by some distance – mean there was nothing of interest to note, though, so let’s take a walk through (the first instalment of) what was said.

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Now that Nicola Sturgeon is finally free of her gruelling MSP workload, which could give her anything up to two extra hours of spare time a week, she might like to start making a proper dent in the contents of her fully-loaded bookshelves.

(At least until they’re seized and sold under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.)

So we thought we’d offer up a few suggestions.

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The multi-statement meltdown that has been the unravelling of Nicola Sturgeon this week has been quite something to behold. Last night, for example, we swear our Twitter feed presented these two tweets one after the other.

But then we read something even more extraordinary.
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We’ll be honest with you, readers, if we were in a situation where a lawyer was issuing statements for us, this isn’t what we’d want to hear.

“If my client had been charged, she’d be in prison right now” is a worrying distance short of a vote of confidence in your client’s innocence.

But the statement Aamer Anwar put out for Nicola Sturgeon last night – her FOURTH in 48 hours, despite saying on Monday morning that she’d be making no further comment on the Peter Murrell case – had rather more wrong with it than even that.

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So, having made a statement on Monday morning which asserted that she wouldn’t make any further statements, then making another statement on Monday afternoon, Nicola Sturgeon and her solicitor issued a third statement in 36 hours last night.

And while we acknowledge that this is a very high bar to clear, it contained one of the most troubling and blatant lies she’s ever told.

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Peter Murrell wasn’t even locked up in his cell at Saughton (we hope it’s the same one as Craig Murray’s) when the chump-suckering resumed.

And as the Nicola Sturgeon Loyal, led by her most faithful of lieutenants, set out to try to take control of the post-conviction narrative, let’s take a look at just what a boatload of bare-faced bullshit the above is.

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So there it is. We did tell you so.

There will be no trial, no cross-examination, no explanation. The people of Scotland, the members and supporters of the SNP, the wider Yes movement, none of us will ever know what really happened. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

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Despite what you or we might think, in the eyes of the Scottish Football Association this ISN’T a pitch invasion. This is simply what a football match in progress looks like.

Because according to the absolutely extraordinary statement they’ve released this evening, that was game time. The clock was still running, nothing was being added to account for the fact that there were thousands of thugs rampaging across the field, and the game was still happening in that moment, until it was ended four seconds later.

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We were excited to discover this old footage of a very young John Swinney.

How thrilled he must be that he’s managed to make his dream come true.

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This game of football is not over.

Except for viewers in Scotland, where no laws apply.

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Looks like this, apparently.

The image below is a graph illustrating how many seats each party won in last week’s supposedly “proportional” Scottish Parliament election, compared to how many they would have won if the electoral system had been actually proportional.

The SNP and Greens are now over-represented by 37% and 50% respectively, while the Unionist parties are all under-represented compared to their vote share by (left to right) 26%, 19%, 20% and 23%.

The Additional Member System has failed very badly at its job, from either perspective. “Pro-indy” parties have 73 seats (57%) rather than the 52 seats that their 40.8% vote share should have earned, while Unionist parties have 56 seats (or 43%) when they should have 69 for their 56% of the vote.

(The other 4% of the vote was scattered among 24 other parties or independents, with 1.8% going to identifiably pro-independence candidates, increasing the total “pro-indy” vote to 42.6%, fully 10 points short of current polling for independence itself.)

It is, therefore, a little bit of a stretch – to put it mildly – to present the refusal of the UK government to grant a second independence referendum on the basis of the results as an outrage against “democracy”. Indeed, if any outrage against democracy has taken place, it happened last Thursday.

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