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.
It is our grave duty to inform readers that Kenny “Kezia Dugdale will be the next First Minister” Farquharson of The Times has done a tweet again.
It’s a curious thing to say before either of the inquiries has delivered its report. The only people who are asserting that Sturgeon has been somehow cleared of involvement in a conspiracy are the SNP, and even their own voters are split down the middle on it.
But let’s just check on how big the SNP are winning right now.
When Nicola Sturgeon is finally held to account for the charred, twisted and shattered ruins that she’s made of Scottish political and civic society in her desperate attempts to save her own neck, the complete discrediting of ostensible support organisations for victims of rape will be near the very top of the charge sheet.
But before we talk about that you really need to read this.
Because if you live in Scotland you can only rationally be one of two things at this moment in history: (a) terrified, or (b) an idiot.
We enjoyed doing this site a lot more when it was the dishonesty of Unionists and the Unionist media, not the SNP, that represented the main threat to independence. So let’s make like it’s the old days, just this once.
Because today has seen the Scottish press falling over itself once again to trumpet the latest joke poll from notorious idiots Scotland In Union as if it was at all meaningful:
And of course it’s purest garbage.
The primary character trait of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is not listening.
…appear to be about to roll over Leslie Evans.
Which in itself raises some extremely serious questions about the judgement of the First Minister who extended Evans’ contract by two years in January 2020, long after she’d known about the series of disastrous and costly blunders Evans had made in the Salmond investigation.
But that’s not even the real story.
Writing about the Hate Crime Bill in the Herald today, Kevin McKenna summarises in a sentence a point this website has been making for many months.
Because the real question about the SNP’s sudden demented obsession with focusing the public’s attention on its most unpopular policies right before supposedly the most important election in its history isn’t “Why?”
It’s “Why now?”
Last week we warned you to beware of poll questions containing the formulation “Does [X] make you more or less likely to vote in a certain way?”, and this evening Survation have provided us with an example of why.
According to those numbers, the conflict between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon has caused a staggering 47% of Scots to change their likelihood of voting Yes in an independence referendum. And the bulk of those – 37% – say it’s made them MUCH more or MUCH less likely to vote Yes.
Those numbers break by more than 2 to 1 (23% to 11%) in favour of “much less likely”, which is a margin of change (12 points) bigger than almost any Yes majority that’s ever been recorded in a poll.
In other words, if the poll is to be believed, Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to neutralise Alex Salmond as a threat to her personal political power has almost definitely turned a Yes vote into a No vote as people have started paying attention to it.
We’re sure most alert readers will by now have seen the purported “leak” of the actual results of the SNP’s mystery-shrouded regional list selections. While the figures are highly believable, we haven’t yet been able to obtain any corroboration for them being anything other than a plausible hoax.
The SNP has of course denied them, but they also denied our recent leak from the party’s draft manifesto and we know for sure that that was real. The trouble with lying all the time is that nobody believes you even if you occasionally tell the the truth.
Of course, there would be an easy way to prove the numbers were a fake – release the real ones, which is in any case the most fundamental element of transparency in a democratic election. And whatever they are could hardly be any more embarrassing than the rumours, which have candidates topping the list (and likely to get seats) on a shocking 2.4% of the vote.
Heavens, even Annie Wells managed 8.6%.
But there’s a much more important reason the SNP will never release the real results.
It brings us genuinely no pleasure at all to report that events in Scottish politics are panning out exactly the way we’ve been telling you they would for nearly two years.
Because this is the worst of all possible worlds.
Finally, after an astonishing four and a half days of “counting”, the SNP have released their candidate rankings for the regional list in this year’s Holyrood election. We’ll give you the results first, and then something much more interesting.
NO SKIPPING STRAIGHT TO THE END, THOUGH.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
