Wings Over Scotland

David Davis may be the last of his kind – a libertarian Tory from a council-scheme and grammar-school background, and also one of the few remaining big beasts occupying the political jungle of the back benches.

(He could in fact have been Tory leader, and would have been if David Cameron and George Osborne hadn’t teamed up to defeat him in 2005 after he won the first ballot.)

He resigned from Cameron’s shadow cabinet in June 2008 on a principled issue of civil liberties (winning the subsequent by-election with a massive 72% of the vote) and from Theresa May’s Cabinet over Brexit, and he was one of a tiny handful of MPs prepared to defend Julian Assange from extradition.

And in 2022 it was Davis who rose from the back benches to tell Boris Johnson to “in the name of God, go”.

So on the rare occasions when he leads a Commons adjournment debate, as he did last Thursday evening, those with an educated eye for politics sit up and take notice.

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So now this has happened:

And even in tweet 1/10, Andy Wightman has told a flat-out lie.

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In the interests of fairness we must note that we did get a response to this post.

Other than being rather more petulant and childish, it was much as expected.

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In any functional nation, Friday’s revelations in Parliament by Sir David Davis would have been headline news. An extremely powerful figure, the then-First Minister’s chief of staff, was named and accused of conspiring with the Scottish Government, civil service and media to imprison an innocent man – the former leader of the country – on very serious charges of sexual assault, and of seeking to destroy his reputation by illegally leaking the false allegations to the press.

Liz Lloyd had never been publicly named as the suspect before that moment, so it was almost immeasurably bizarre that only two of Scotland’s newspapers (and two of its lowest-selling), namely The Times and – belatedly – The National, bothered to even report the accusation, far less spend any time seriously delving into it.

But it still wasn’t as odd as THIS response from a former Green MSP.

What on Earth is being suggested here? Let’s try to find out.

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Independence is dead as a political issue in Scotland for the next few years. This much should not be in any dispute. A Labour government with a crushing majority sits firmly in Westminster with absolutely no intentions of granting a second referendum, and the SNP has loudly and clearly abandoned any other strategy.

This fact is understandably painful and difficult to come to terms with for anyone who’s devoted the last 13 years (or more) to pursuing that cause and now isn’t quite sure what to do with theirself. But for those who still aren’t ready to face up to the unpleasant reality, there’s always the comforting world of fantasy.

Because there’s always money to be made from snake oil and pie in the sky.

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The average rape sentence in Scotland is seven years, so to get six years plus three years’ supervision for the technically lesser crime of sexual assaults means they must have been pretty grim ones.

So we know that Cameron Downing is a very bad man. Which does rather invite the question of why he was so popular in the SNP.

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The SNP have been pretty clear about the reason they think they got a battering in last week’s election: it was because people were voting to kick out the Tories.

Now, that’s obviously nonsense. There were almost no Tories in Scotland to start with – just 10% of voters had a Tory MP – and only one of the six actually lost his seat. (Which was entirely down to the ham-fisted interference of Douglas Ross rather than an SNP surge – the SNP’s vote share in the seat in question went DOWN.)

If you wanted to keep Tories out in Scotland all you had to do was keep voting for your current MP, most of whom were SNP, rather than risk splitting the anti-Tory vote by switching to Labour and risk letting the Tories squeeze through in the middle. (Which would have happened in many seats had the Tories’ own vote not collapsed.)

But if it was true that the SNP lost because the electorate thought the election was about getting rid of the Tories, whose fault was that?

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Ah, the innocent and hopeful days of May.

Just for a bit of fun, shall we see how that went?

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To be honest, folks, we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves at the moment.

Everyone and his wee dug is writing election-aftermath columns and offering the SNP advice of varying intelligence and solemnity about how to recover from the shattering blow they’ve just been dealt by Scottish voters.

But it’s a pointless exercise. They may as well be yelling down a manhole.

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Don’t say we don’t tell you this stuff, readers.

Because we always do.

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Well, we hope you all listened to us in January and got your bets in.

Enjoy your winnings. Because the real work starts now.

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It’s almost 20 years since this last happened.

The 2005 election was the last time the Daily Record and the Scottish Sun both endorsed the same party at a UK general election. So, y’know, something is going on.

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