Yesterday we took an extensive tour of all the red flags in the SNP’s 2022 accounts, which show a party in very deep financial trouble. But there was one part we left out because it deserves a post of its own.
It starkly exposes how a party chose to hold an event for around 800 members in a venue with a capacity of 15,000 and then went to a lot of effort to disguise how empty the space was, rather than, for example, just hiring somewhere of an appropriate size (and cost) in the first place.
(Look how far into the hall the stage has been placed, leaving half the arena vacant, to then be hidden behind a giant screen and curtains and banners in order to give a false impression of how full it is.)
But what’s more symbolic is that there are almost no people in it.
Slacky The Holiday Boy is off for the next THREE weeks, gallivanting around the globe on the clearly excessive wages we’re paying him. We hope he does actually come back, because his home city is becoming a poisonously hostile place for the creative.
Around 300 years ago, Edinburgh was the birthplace and residence of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual and scientific accomplishment built around “the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason”, and which led to the city being famously dubbed “the Athens of the North”.
Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.
Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.
But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.
Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.
The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.
Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.
Wings readers are of course the last people in the country who need any reminding of what a ditch-slithering creature Scottish Labour activist Duncan Hothersall is. And in truth by his standards these tweets are only about averagely despicable.
Even not-very-alert readers will have noticed that we’re taking a little summer holiday in the complete absence of any political events. Rest assured that we’re using the time to patrol Bath diligently for bears. But we couldn’t help noticing this on Twitter today.
Someone tweeted it to show that as late as summer 2020 the SNP was still soliciting money for what it called its “ring fenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund”.
Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella.
Northcode on A matter of class: “DANCE, SLAVE, DANCE! Yet another imprinted sex-bonded colonist to add to my entourage of sex-bonded colonists.” Dec 21, 13:36
Northcode on A matter of class: ““… does not an imprinted sex-bonded slave make.” This is an example of another flower of rhetoric called Hyperbaton. Made…” Dec 21, 13:31
Alf Baird on A matter of class: ““Why, oh, why… do the colonists on here come across as being a tad thuggish?” Maybe because ‘colonialism is force’…” Dec 21, 13:26
Northcode on A matter of class: “I mispeeled incomprehemsibeness (I’m big enough to own my literary failures)… it should, of course, read as incomprehensibleness (which is…” Dec 21, 13:20
James Cheyne on A matter of class: “Perhaps Scots do not wish to replace pretend union for the civic nations kind of union,” Dec 21, 13:08
Northcode on A matter of class: “A colonist speaks… and, as usual, it speaks incomprehemsibeness… and Inglis its first lingo tae. I shall deal with its…” Dec 21, 13:06
Andy Ellis on A matter of class: “The responses BTL from the usual suspects tend to give the lie to your assertion though Northy. We all know…” Dec 21, 13:01
James Cheyne on A matter of class: “For a English Irish parliament and the Queen of England and Ireland cannot fit that Humpty dumpty parliament again,” Dec 21, 12:59
James Cheyne on A matter of class: “History is replete with the ghosts of vanished States. So it is, No more Succession to the Hanoverian dynasty since…” Dec 21, 12:54
GM on A matter of class: “Interesting juxtaposition Ben Hope. Dinnae gie up hope o’ a court case or twa in the new year. I haven’t.…” Dec 21, 12:45
Captain Caveman on A matter of class: “Hey Fatso, are you still looking down on the hardworking poor, e.g. McDonalds workers getting up at 6am to work…” Dec 21, 12:38
James on A matter of class: “Northy; The Site Prick proved your point – within 25 meenits! Watch oot, the resident Yoons have got the hots…” Dec 21, 12:25
Northcode on A matter of class: “Why, oh, why (anyone know what this sweetly scented thing is?) do the colonists on here come across as being…” Dec 21, 12:17
Andy Ellis on A matter of class: “Kudos to Northcode for introducing the esoteric concept of egrogores to BTL discourse, if for little else in his nativistic…” Dec 21, 12:12
Northcode on A matter of class: “DANCE, SLAVE, DANCE!” Dec 21, 12:00
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “Moving whit, Northy? Yer bowels? A poignant and moving text written in (checks notes) the lying language of the coloniser?…” Dec 21, 11:57
Northcode on A matter of class: “How does one deploy a Diacope in a sentence? A Diacope is a flower… a flower of rhetoric. Some folk…” Dec 21, 11:56
Northcode on A matter of class: “Thanks, Alf. A moving quote from Jones. Filled with a poignancy only the colonized could appreciate – or even understand,…” Dec 21, 11:27
Northcode on A matter of class: “Thanks, diabloandco. Imprinted sex-bonded slaves are a guid laugh (I think James acquired some to play with, too). I wrote…” Dec 21, 11:22
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “Careful, Dave, there might have been one sitting right behind you on the bus the other day. Dinna be fooled…” Dec 21, 11:21
Northcode on A matter of class: “A wis inspired tae scribble doun a poem… a’ve nae idea whit by – it juist popped intae ma heid…” Dec 21, 11:18
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “@factchecker Which part of the regularly repeated claim that “the moon is made of cheese” are you failing to process?…” Dec 21, 11:12
DaveL on A matter of class: “You seem to be ok with nazis, why don’t you tell folks about your ‘fighting friends in the east’ national…” Dec 21, 11:08
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “Xmas almost being upon us, I won’t be so cruel as to ask you to show your working and thus…” Dec 21, 11:06
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “Crivens, it’s Bivens noo! Got to say, Alf, qualifying Jones as Welsh is probably unnecessary. I’m intrigued by the idea…” Dec 21, 10:59
diabloandco on A matter of class: “A great response Northcode!” Dec 21, 10:51
Northcode on A matter of class: “DANCE! DANCE TO THE TUNE OF MY CHOOSING, SLAVE!” Dec 21, 10:40
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “A real actual Nazi, eh Confused? What’s your favourite word to describe pretendy, part-time Nazis? “Ersatz” has a certain je…” Dec 21, 10:26
Hatey McHateface on A matter of class: “Eeyore ye say, Northy? Maybe ye hae a point. But I notice ye’ve carelessly left your questions unanswered. Just as…” Dec 21, 10:15
Alf Baird on A matter of class: ““How can a people oppressed share a common morality with their oppressor?” Eloquently put, Northcode. In a colonial and hence…” Dec 21, 10:11
