Wings Over Scotland

Do you remember, readers, how the next UK election was supposed to be a single-issue de facto referendum on independence if the Supreme Court ruled Holyrood didn’t have the power to hold one itself?

Well, it appears that policy has been abruptly and quietly ditched.

Because just a couple of hours ago SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford told BBC News that “I can assure you” the SNP “will have a growth manifesto” for the whole UK whenever the next election comes around, because in his view the UK economy hasn’t been growing enough for the last few decades and the SNP would have a plan to fix it. Because apparently fixing the UK is the SNP’s purpose now.

Guess we better hope for a good result from the Supreme Court, then.

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The only major prediction this site has gotten wrong in the last decade is that we didn’t think Theresa May would be so stupid as to call a general election in 2017.

And while the prediction itself wasn’t vindicated, the reasoning behind it certainly was, because she duly lost her majority just as we said she would, and limped pitifully into oblivion over the next two painful and shambolic years. (While Nicola Sturgeon ponced around hopelessly trying to stop Brexit instead of saving Scotland by getting it the hell out of the UK before it was too late.)

So it’s in that spirit that we’re going to stick our necks out once again and predict that despite the opinions of most political pundits Liz Truss is going nowhere any time soon, because as incredible as it seems, she’s almost certainly the least worst option for the Conservative Party right now.

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Honestly, readers, swear to God, all joking and sarcasm aside, when we saw this tweet yesterday we were wondering how on Earth some clever satirist had managed to hack Anas Sarwar’s account to insert the screenshot into it.

Because we didn’t believe that even Scottish Labour’s low-watt-bulb of a branch manager would willingly post something that made him look so much of an imbecile.

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First of all, congratulations to the Herald for only being eight days behind a retired website on this story. Unusually fast work, lads.

Now let’s deal with the spin.

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A quick schedule for the future.

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You know how the SNP are always going on about how bad the Tories are and how urgently we need to get rid of them? Well, it turns out they don’t want that to happen for at least a couple of years. They just want a different Tory as Prime Minister, even though they keep telling us that Boris Johnson is the greatest recruiting sergeant for independence there could be.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

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A few days have now passed since Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement of the supposed routemap to an independence referendum, and we’ve had time to analyse it properly.

You’re not going to like it much.

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So we now know, if it was ever in doubt, that the Scottish Government is not remotely serious about holding an independence referendum in 2023.

Today’s speech by the First Minister revealed one positive act: that she finally intends to do what this website has been repeatedly calling on her to do since April 2018, by establishing once and for all whether or not the Scottish Parliament has the power to conduct an independence referendum, and that if it is determined by the Supreme Court that it does not, she intends to do what this site called on her to do a year and a half ago – conduct the next general election (now due in late 2024) as a plebiscite.

We’re not sure what the point of frittering away five years by waiting was.

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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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