Wings Over Scotland

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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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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The final result of our Twitter poll from yesterday was pretty conclusive.

(It was also by a distance the biggest response we can ever remember getting for one – normally our Twitter polls get around 3,000 votes.)

But of course Twitter polls aren’t scientific – they’re self-selecting and they draw from a biased sample, in this case people who follow Wings and are more likely to agree with us on most things. So we need a bit more data for a better picture.

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The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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