Wings Over Scotland

Half a decade apart, almost to the day.

So what are we expecting?

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Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.

The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.

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There was, very obviously, no “indyref2 campaign launch” yesterday, not least for the reason that there is no indyref2. Nothing whatsoever has changed from the situation which has persisted for the last six years, namely that the SNP says it wants another referendum and the UK government says it can’t have one.

There has been no agreement and there has been no legal judgement settling the impasse. No laws have been passed, no date has been set (though a flustered Angus Robertson blurted out something about next October on Good Morning Scotland), no preparations have been made.

And while The National might have another 10-page special today insisting that the game is on, the house comic of the SNP’s woke wing has, one might gently say, a certain amount of prior form in this regard.

So we’ll make this brief.

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While this site remains mothballed, it’s nice to keep a steady trickle of traffic going just in case it ever needs to spring back to life, eg if someone actually interested in independence suddenly somehow becomes leader of the SNP again.

So we thought it might be fun to just briefly link to some old articles as and when they became topical once more, and as luck would have it tomorrow is such an occasion.

Because that’s when the SNP will launch the first of a series of new papers outlining the First Minister’s “vision” of independence by waffling on about how it would be a jolly good thing, in the unlikely event that she ever got off her extremely well-paid arse and achieved it.

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This is getting properly embarrassing.

Because that starting gun must be red-hot by now.

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As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.

In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.

The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.

If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.

Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.

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15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

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We had some poll questions out with Panelbase last week. The results were in most ways wholly unsurprising, in line with all previous polls on the subject. Here they are.

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To: Humza Yousaf (Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care), Shirley-Anne Somerville (Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills) and Clare Haughey (Minister for Children and Young People)

28 April 2022

Dear Mr Yousaf, Ms Somerville and Ms Haughey,

Cass Interim Report: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – Implications for Scotland

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In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.

It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)

April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.

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The trans-sex-role-stereotype movement has put what would have been concealed and kept behind closed doors on centre stage. This is why normal, decent men look aghast at other men’s behaviour while many women sigh with an ‘oh, this again’.

The woke bloke contempt for women is clear and abusive behaviours are on full display. Reading through Lundy Bancroft’s pivotal work “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men”, the full cast of characters is present on Twitter, in the news and in our political parties and institutions.

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Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.

Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.

This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.

And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.

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