Ah, so NOW we know why the SNP’s woke junior league stitched up the NEC to stop serious, talented and experienced politicians like Joanna Cherry and Philippa Whitford standing as MSPs in next year’s Holyrood election.
Who could ever have guessed, etc?
Labour sub-faction the Scottish Fabians this weekend published a call for “a new Act Of Union”, an idea that’s been kicking around in the party for some time since failed branch office manager Kezia Dugdale came up with it in 2016.
And at first it sounds almost intelligent and democratic, proposing a clearly defined path by which any of the four constituent nations of the UK could become independent.
But then you get to the small print.
It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.
Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.
To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.
Alert readers will be aware of very considerable recent active involvement by Police Scotland in matters relating to alleged contempt of court with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond. A blog in April by Craig Murray gave some details.
So we were extremely surprised by a letter we received this week.
It seems fair to say that the SNP’s shady, ugly coup d’etwats yesterday hasn’t gone down massively well. Social media was awash in pictures of cut-up membership cards and resignation letters, and some of the most moderate voices in the commentariat also decried the stitch-ups of Joanna Cherry and James Dornan.
The NEC meeting which forced through the new rules was held in secret and nobody knows who was present or who voted for what. Indeed, even the identities of the NEC’s members are largely not public knowledge.
But there’s one thing we do know.
SNP MSP James Dornan is someone Wings always had a lot of time for, at least until his shameful and central role in the stitch-up of Mark McDonald – an act which was the foundation stone for all of the party’s subsequent chicanery. We can only speculate as to his motivations for doing so, and their connection or otherwise to a certain deranged and ambitious fantasist in his close circle.
But as anyone who’s watched The Usual Suspects (or GoodFellas, or pretty much any classic-era Bond movie) will tell you, the real villains have a nasty habit, once they’ve achieved their goals, of “tidying up” anyone who might link them to their misdeeds – especially if those people don’t fit the ideal of their brave new worlds.
So an old, straight, white, working-class male like James Dornan, who signed the SNP Women’s Pledge, was always likely to find himself propping up a motorway flyover at some point sooner or later, and thus it has proved.
Out of 100, exactly how humiliated do you feel today on learning that the leadership of your party has so little faith in you winning the Edinburgh Central nomination fair and square – despite all your advantages, connections and long party history – that it’s had to stack the deck with such an unprecedented, transparent, embarrassing fiddle to try to get you in? Because tbh, if it was us we’d be too ashamed to show our face.
No rush, take as long as you like. Just like you’re doing with independence.
The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:
So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:
That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.
Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.
Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!
But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.
In the light of several news stories today, we thought it’d be useful to keep a record of which organisations and individuals had now publicly expressed strong reservations or outright opposition to the Scottish Government’s alarming and deeply illiberal proposed new Hate Crime Bill, and which had expressed support.
This list will be updated as required.
Alert readers may have noticed that the hypothetical Wings list party is once again the talk of the steamie, with the usual suspects stamping their feet and pouting about it yet again on social media, in particular the firmly-ensconced SNP MP Pete Wishart and the worryingly obsessed former poll-analysis website WINGS OVER SCOTLAND IS BAD AND TERRIBLE AND STUART CAMPBELL SOMETIMES DOES SWEARS SO NOBODY WOULD EVER VOTE FOR HIM! Goes Pop.
(We’re not sure where this sudden outbreak of 18th-century Puritanism about Scottish people using colourful language has come from, to be honest. It seems the weirdest and least plausible grounds for objection imaginable in a country that’s literally world-famous for its enthusiastic embrace of swearing, but *shrug*.)
The trigger was a bizarre piece in yesterday’s Courier (also picked up by the National, the Evening Express and others). They phoned us last week ostensibly to talk about a new website set up by a bunch of loony Unionist zoomers who with amusingly ironic timing have named themselves “The Majority”, and whether we thought they’d have any impact or be able to attract funding.
We chatted perfectly amiably to the reporter for several minutes on the subject, so we were quite surprised when the story that eventually appeared didn’t contain a single mention of them, and instead was solely about the Wings party, which he’d also asked us a couple of “Oh, by the way, while I’m here”-type questions about.
So let’s just clarify a couple of things for the record (again).
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
