Well, what an odd day that’s been.
Because for a start, if you’re the one person in Scotland who believes the above, please drop us a line. We’d love to have a chat with you.
So a week and a bit after the deadline, this arrived.
And it’s not quite what you were told before.
Scottish politics might be a binfire floating down an overflowing sewer, but it’s nice to know there are at least a few things that are reliable constants, and one of them is that George Foulkes is an idiot.
But while his tweet is wrong, it’s not VERY wrong.
To be honest, Humza Yousaf’s new Cabinet satirises itself – everyone’s picking on the absurdity of noted idiot Shona Robison becoming Finance Secretary but the funniest is surely omnifailure Shirley-Anne Somerville as Trans Rights – sorry, “Social Justice” Secretary – so rather than waste our breath on it today we’re going to catch up on some results from our latest Panelbase poll that we haven’t managed to squeeze in amid the mayhem of the last couple of weeks.
They tell us some interesting things about the Scotland the new FM now leads.
Well, we’re off to a flying start.
This is certainly what the public want. So let’s see his plans.
The beam on Kate Forbes’ face was quite something.
She’d clearly been exhausted by the contest some time ago, and must have been dreading winning and having to continue fighting the assault from within her own party. Her evident delight and relief at her own failure was a revealing moment.
The great unknown in this election was just who the SNP membership was. No poll could tell us, and with over 50,000 people having quit the party in the last three years, nobody knew who was left. But we know now: idiots.
Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.
So let’s see the final scores on the doors.
There can surely be no credible disputing that the SNP leadership election – and therefore that of Scotland’s next First Minister – is, to put it very mildly, under a cloud.
The list of let’s call them “irregularities” is almost endless. The artificial truncation of the contest, against the SNP constitution; the packing of the hustings with Humza Yousaf supporters; candidates being denied any knowledge about the size of the membership until voting was under way, and then the party’s press chief and CEO both resigning over lying about it; the apparent existence of 6000 more ballot papers than the party has members; one of the Scottish Government’s most senior officers being improperly seconded to the Yousaf campaign (and then also resigning as a result); numerous documented examples of non-members being given votes while fully-paid-up members weren’t; we could, frankly, go on and on.
As things stand, whoever wins will be forever tainted by the process – easy meat for the Unionist opposition in the Holyrood chamber and the media and a potential legal challenge could cause untold further damage to the party.
With six days still left for voting, the case for a reballot – an administratively fairly trivial task in an election being conducted almost entirely online – is now unanswerable, and needn’t even involve a delay.
Only one person stands in the way.
The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.
It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.
The mainstream Scottish political media might not have many professional standards, but there’s one it’s still pretty diligent about upholding.
And that’s that if a political party’s press office starts really taking liberties and making them look like fools, all bets (and gloves) are off.
…of the SNP has been in the post for quite some time.
Because no party can prosper for long when it’s stuffed full of complete dum-dums.
How it started, just one month ago:
And how it’s going:
But it’s quite a lot worse than it looks.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
