Wings Over Scotland

For 10 years in Germany between 1935 and 1945, Jewish people were not legally human. The Nuremberg Laws, drafted in large part by Wilhelm Stuckart, established the principle in law that Jews were to be denied any rights on the basis that they were untermensch, a German word literally meaning “subhuman”.

It would be, to say the least, highly controversial for anyone to put forward in 2025 the idea that Jewish people had actually ceased to be human beings during that period, even though the various laws had been passed by a legitimately-elected government in peacetime and attracted little in the way of international condemnation.

The truth is that regardless of what the law said, Jewish people remained humans for the whole time, which is why Nazi war criminals were tried after the war for “crimes against humanity”. The passing of a law had had absolutely no effect on their biological reality. (Other than that it led to millions of them being murdered, of course.)

But anyway. Nicola Sturgeon.

Is the above how she imagined her feminist legacy, do you think, readers?

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This is the SNP’s latest messaging. Ministers, MSPs, payroll drones and the central party account were all tweeting the graphic and variations on the line yesterday.

And it’s quite difficult even just to count the number of different ways in which it’s not just mind-bogglingly offensive, but also clatteringly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

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It’s a well-known truism that if a newspaper headline is phrased as a question, the answer to that question is always “No”.

And nothing’s changed here.

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It’s worth remembering that they didn’t have to do this.

Labour had already announced their intention to abstain. There was no danger of the budget being defeated. So the SNP could have allocated however much money they wanted from their increased funding to the pursuit of independence.

And maybe they did.

People sometimes ask us if we get bored of being right all the time.

But in truth, we just wish we had to work a bit harder at it.

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Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.

You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).

We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.

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The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.

It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.

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Way back in the day, the Lib Dems in particular, but also other parties and the “Better Together” campaign, were infamous for the “dodgy barchart” tactic.

And so degraded is the modern SNP, it’s now scraping the same barrel.

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In the recent US election, the Democrats made a huge play out of the notion that the very concept of democracy itself was at risk if Donald Trump won.

And yet his eventual victory was unquestionably democratic. Not only did Trump win under the electoral college system by a huge 312-226 margin, and secure control of both the Senate and the House Of Representatives, he also beat Kamala Harris in the popular vote, by 50% to 48%. By every possible count and measure, Trump was the legitimate winner and has a clear mandate to govern for the next four years.

Over in the UK, however, things aren’t quite so neat and tidy.

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Y’know, maybe we were a little harsh on the lads at Holyrood Sources yesterday when we implied that a more direct and aggressive interviewing style might have cut through John Swinney and Kate Forbes’ pathetically feeble waffling evasion on the SNP’s lack of an independence strategy in their recent podcast.

But the closest thing (along with Colin Mackay at STV) that the Scottish media has left to a proper Rottweiler interviewer – Peter Adam Smith of ITV – had a shot at that five years ago and didn’t do any better.

Smith noted that even back in 2019 Nicola Sturgeon had been droning on about how Westminster’s refusal to grant a second indy referendum was “unsustainable” for two years already. But no matter how hard he pressed, Sturgeon just kept on glibly and smugly insisting that they’d concede.

“The UK government strategy is to say no. Do you have a way around it?”

“My strategy is to say yes.” [smirks]

Readers might be forgiven for wondering how long it’s going to take the SNP to accept that that “strategy” is a failure, if seven years and three First Ministers isn’t enough for them to have worked it out. But as long as the pathologically gullible keep voting for them anyway, we suppose they have no reason to.

Don’t watch this. You’ll only waste 12 minutes of your life making yourself angry.

It’s our job to be angry for you.

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Nobody really answered the question in this article from a few days ago. A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government.

That scenario depends on all sorts of dubious propositions, but in any event what none of them have addressed is what that would change even if it did happen, given that Holyrood has a pro-indy majority RIGHT NOW (and has done so on every single day since the indyref more than a decade ago) and it’s produced nothing whatsoever in terms of movement towards independence by any possible measure.

And it occurred to us that we had genuinely no idea what the SNP’s current official indy strategy is, because the party’s been in such farcical chaos and turmoil ever since Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden resignation. So we thought we should go and check.

To be honest, we’re not much the wiser for having read it.

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