Wings Over Scotland

Can you spot the subtle change between these two National stories, readers?

Now, as they’re both in The National the standard of journalism is obviously completely dreadful, and so neither of them actually explains their headline. Nobody is named or quoted even anonymously, and there’s no elaboration other than that “[a member of] the NEC appeared to halt any proposal to use the next General Election as a proxy constitutional vote”, with no indication of HOW they “appeared” to do that.

But they DO raise the question of where on Earth – whoever becomes its new leader – the SNP goes from the smouldering bomb crater that Nicola Sturgeon has left it in.

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So here we are, the morning after the morning before.

The thing that had to happen happened. What happens now?

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Firstly, some of you owe us money.

But much more importantly, why now?

Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland’s press this morning that despite her weariness, she could have managed a few more months or even a year as First Minister, which would at least have got her halfway to keeping her promise to serve a full term if she was elected in 2021.

Which just makes her timing all the harder to explain.

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Last night we tweeted this:

We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.

As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.

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We’ve just had the results back from some very interesting new polling, and the first snippet is a particularly instructive one.

When challenged on questions of gender, the reflex response of politicians of most parties in the Scottish Parliament is to bang on about how overwhelmingly MSPs voted for the Gender Recognition Reform bill.

Curiously, so far no journalist has bothered to ask whether they care that according to every poll, they’re utterly failing to represent the views of their constituents on the subject – which is, after all, what they’re supposed to be there for.

So we just asked directly if people felt their MSPs were doing their jobs.

Ouch. By well over 2 to 1, respondents felt that they were being let down by the people who are supposed to speak for them. (Excluding DKs the margin is just shy of 70/30, very similar to the margin by which people in polls oppose self-ID generally.)

But it’s when you drill down into the detail that it gets a bit disturbing.

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It might not look like much. But this, readers, is the moment of truth.

Because what you see above is the reckoning Nicola Sturgeon can’t run from.

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Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:

Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.

Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.

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Diligently alert readers may have noticed that the SNP MP, former vomit-mopper and permanent embarrassment to braincells Stewart McDonald has an article in today’s National about the best way to look like he’s trying to secure independence without risking losing his cosy lucrative job in glamorous London with all his fancy MP pals.

(McDonald is also one of the party’s most virulent advocates of its massively unpopular gender reforms, which isn’t relevant to anything but we’ve got a streak to maintain.)

Unfortunately it’s 4,000 words long and unbearably boring, but since you pay us we’ve taken the bullet for you, read the whole thing and now present it here in précis form:

“Westminster will not recognise a vote of over 50% in a de facto referendum, but it WILL recognise a vote of LESS than 50% as a mandate for another referendum. Even though we’ve already achieved that four times and they’ve refused to recognise it, it’ll be different a fifth time because it just will.”

That’s it. That’s all you missed. As you were.

The title of this article might sound a bit like the name of a band making their debut at Glastonbury this year, but in fact it’s something infinitely more serious.

News broke late last night that the person we must presumably now refer to as an “individual” who had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of a missing Galashiels schoolgirl (happily found safe and well and back home with her parents) had in fact been charged with an as-yet-unspecified crime.

But the alleged crime wasn’t the only thing going unspecified.

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The First Minister has gotten herself into quite a pickle.

But worse, there’s no way out of it.

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It’s been a rough old week for the First Minister.

And next week’s not looking much better.

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Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.

BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)

On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)

She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.

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