Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.

He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.

(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)

So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.

And yet here we are.

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Yesterday we mentioned an SNP election leaflet that someone had posted on social media. It turns out that either deliberately or accidentally (probably the latter, while taking out the bit with their name and address on it) they’d cropped off part of it containing a logo that does passingly refer to independence. You can see it down at the bottom-right corner.

So we should note that by way of clarification. But what’s more interesting about the rest of the leaflet is that if you took the logos off it, it could be from literally ANY of the parties contesting the election. It contains no policies whatsoever, just some general feelgood sloganeering. Which parties, do you suppose, are campaigning AGAINST “equipping children to succeed” or “supporting businesses” or “creating jobs”?

The deeper truth is that the leaflet demonstrates how completely pointless this election actually is, because nothing you do with your vote next month is going to affect anything that happens in the subsequent five years. Only one party is going to win, and once they do it won’t matter what’s in the 76-page “manifesto” they released today. The manifesto is a fake – in reality it amounts to a single line: “keep us in power so we can fill our pockets and do whatever we like for another half a decade, suckers”.

Allow us to illustrate.

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Not for the first time, a certain section of society in Scotland and elsewhere is today engaged in the furious insistence that words don’t mean what they actually mean.

The words above are not ambiguous. They call for the “elimination” of “all laws limiting [the] legal capacity of adolescents […] to consent to sex”. The only laws which limit the legal capacity of adolescents – people aged from 10 to 19, according to both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations – to consent to sex are age of consent laws. The clue is somewhat in the name.

If organisations don’t want those laws abolished so that 10-year-olds can have sex, then they shouldn’t sign their names to statements saying that they do.

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There’s something missing from this.

Can you spot it, readers?

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If you still can’t see it, you’re probably never going to wake up.

But have a little think about those highlighted words this morning anyway.

It’s probably past time that we put this all in one post for easy reference.

Herald journalists with no idea what a story is, start here.

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At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.

Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.

So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.

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It’s already getting hard to keep up with the string of well-kent faces and veteran indy campaigners leaving the SNP to join Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party.

It might be an idea to start maintaining a list.

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There’s a lot of this going around from SNP and Unionists alike this weekend.

Because, as we may have mentioned before, they really do think you’re stupid.

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Any time you’re not sure whether something that happens in Scottish politics is good or bad for the cause of independence, here’s a top tip for you: see how the enemies of independence feel about it.

“Running scared” would seem to be a fair, if understated, summary.

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Hey folks, remember the happy days when indyref 2 was going to be in “the first half” of the next Parliament? Well, here comes the totally surprising and unexpected news.

This was Ian Blackford on Sky News yesterday, quietly confirming that at best we can expect it in the SECOND half of the Parliament, ie 2024 at the earliest. (And that’s with all the usual waffly evasiveness about how it could be achieved.)

So if readers were wondering why Blackford had quickly released a squirrel to distract from the appearance, perhaps now they know.

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We were reminded this week of the amount of stick we got when we wrote these words almost five years ago, right after the 2016 Holyrood election:

(The rest of our post-match analysis wasn’t too shabby either.)

But readers, we have to grudgingly admit: we’re only NEARLY always right.

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