Wings Over Scotland

It can be very hard to follow the arguments of people trying to convince you to vote for the SNP on the regional list at next year’s election. Here’s one just a month ago:

So that’s clear – indy supporters MUST IGNORE the “siren voices” telling them to vote for smaller indy parties, because they can’t win any seats and therefore to vote for them is to “throw away” your list vote.

And this was them just two weeks ago, strenuously insisting that the small parties were a busted flush and there was no chance of a “non-SNP route to independence”:

So it was a bit confusing to read this yesterday:

Because all of a sudden, it seems that you CAN vote for the smaller indy parties, regardless of whether they win seats or not, because the list vote will actually be a de-facto referendum and the votes will still count. And indeed, apparently you SHOULD do so, because an SNP-only route – the thing which was the only hope a fortnight ago – is now “totally unachievable” and ONLY working in concert with the smaller indy parties can succeed.

Heavens, what huge transformative event did we miss?

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These two Sunday front pages three weeks apart sounded awfully similar.

But it turned out to be a lot worse than we thought.

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When we get bored in the summer silly season, we often start poking around in stats. This week we’d been pondering the complete waste of everyone’s time Anas Sarwar’s four and a half years in charge of Scottish Labour have been, and the open goal he’s missed in failing to capitalise on a period of constant chaos and turmoil for the SNP.

That got us to thinking about which leaders in the Scottish Parliament era have made a significant difference (in either direction) to the fortunes of their parties, and from there it was pretty short work to illustrate it in the form of a graph.

It rather leaps out at you, doesn’t it?

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There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.

“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.

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No, wait, hear us out.

It’s not what you think.

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At some point, we’re all going to have to have a discussion about the word “normal”.

Because suffering from a debilitating mental illness that supposedly causes you to commit suicide if medical professionals don’t pump you full of wrong-sex hormones and/or mutilate or remove healthy and functioning parts of your body, and which affects no more than 1 in 300 people, is NOT, in fact, “completely normal”. Nor is having a physical disorder affecting less than 1 in 5,000 people. They’re the exact opposite of that. They’re extremely abnormal.

(“Abnormal” is not an intrinsically pejorative term, it’s a simple neutral statement of fact, meaning something that’s uncommon or unusual.)

But that’s not the main problem with NHS Fife’s “LGBTQI+” website.

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For the combatants in the gender wars, it’s been quite a spring and summer here in the TERF Island theatre of battle.

In February, polling company YouGov revealed the vast extent to which public opinion has shifted around the issue (significantly though not entirely in the wake of the Cass Review last April), which we reported on via a snazzy Stalingrad metaphor. But just as with Stalingrad, it was only the precursor to the recapture of territory on an epic scale.

So let’s recap what we’ve won and what it means.

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You might think you’ve heard this tired old song before.

But wait! This one’s streamlined! Come back!

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We’ve said it for a lot of years, but “1984” really does contain a complete explanation of every aspect of modern life, and especially politics.

So let’s look at today’s Herald On Sunday, and in particular its “special report”.

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It seems like almost every time somebody gets accused of rape, sexual harassment or any kind of horrible creepy sex-based sleaze in Scotland these days, the same face is always lurking around grinning in the background somewhere.

Can you guess who it is yet?

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So this snuck out quietly at the bottom of page 2 of today’s Daily Record.

And like, we suspect, most of Scotland, our response was “WHAT?”

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet, scammers used to have to work a bit harder to cheat people than they do now.

A popular method was to advertise a “clearance sale” in the press. You’d see an ad in the Daily Record or a local paper for an event in a High Street location – typically a vacant shop – promising brand-new TVs for £20, microwaves for a fiver, toasters for £2.50 or whatever. So you’d show up on the day and it always worked the same.

There’d be the ringmaster on a raised platform, surrounded by loads of unmarked white boxes, and he’d start off by picking some “random” punter from the crowd and bestowing gifts upon him. This guy would walk away with armfuls of swag for £25 or something (doubtless just going straight round the back with them), and the real show would begin.

Next the ringmaster would say “Now, before we get properly started, who’ll give me £10 for what’s on my mind?” (that phrase, “what’s on my mind”, was always the same). And basically they were flogging a mystery box, invariably containing a few trashy trinkets worth a fraction of the cost.

Any chump who bought one would then be escorted out of the shop before opening it, on the pretence that the bargains on offer in these sales were so great that they were limited to one per person. (There was always security on the door, sometimes even cops. There’s nothing intrinsically illegal about selling mystery boxes, even mainstream chainstores still do it today.)

And that was basically it. The ringmaster would delay and delay, punting more mystery boxes and never actually getting to the bit where you could buy a specific item at a specific price, and after a couple of hours the event would close down and the would-be customers would disperse in disgruntlement.

Now here’s John Swinney.

He’s got a mystery box to sell you.

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