Wings Over Scotland

Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.

Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!

But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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Late last week, Wings finally received a long-overdue full response to the queries we first made to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) in early April, regarding several matters connected to the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond.

(You’re supposed to get a reply in 20 working days. It’s been nearly four months.)

The unmappable fog-filled labyrinth that COPFS (under the Lord Advocate, W. James Wolffe QC), the Scottish Government and the civil service are attempting to construct around these matters is so tangled that it’s taken us a few days to sit down and make some sense of it, but the truth that’s being coaxed, painfully slowly, into the light is one that paints a truly disturbing picture.

We invite you to examine it for yourself and see if you disagree.

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It’s hard to express quite what a revolting piece of rank hypocrisy this is.

Behold, ladies and gentlemen and other genders, some pious little twerp whose own comfy seat in the Scottish Parliament was secured entirely by what he calls “cheating”, saying that nobody but him and his mates are allowed to cheat now.

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A concept has recently arisen in Scottish politics for which this site feels at least partly responsible, and which is making the strangest bedfellows of Unionist commentators and SNP ultra-loyalists. It’s summed up very concisely in today’s Times.

Let’s just unpick that extraordinary meltdown for a moment.

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Two opinion polls, just over one Parliamentary term apart:

MAY 2014

JULY 2020

That is not a politically healthy country, readers.

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The Huffington Post published a poll today, to the great delight of the likes of Stonewall Scotland, which seemed to fly in the face of every previous one on the idea of gender self-identification, a policy which appears to have been dumped by the UK government but is still very much in favour with the Scottish one.

That the poll had been commissioned by trans uber-fundamentalist website Pink News immediately set off alarm bells, especially as the site had previously asked a similar question, found dramatically different results and swiftly disappeared them.

As ever, Wings went looking for the truth.

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Our most extra-specially alert readers may have recently noticed the website of some dodgy chancer claiming that a recent opinion poll by Survation showed high support for a pro-independence list party led by Alex Salmond.

Unfortunately, no such poll existed. The site owner blanked every request to back up his assertion with a link to the supposed survey, and it rapidly became clear that it was a totally fabricated piece of attention-seeking which we won’t indulge with a link.

But it seemed worth asking the question for real.

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We were looking for something else this afternoon, but accidentally found this:

Just two weeks before the last Holyrood election, widely-respected analysts Weber Shandwick had put together a prediction of how the results would pan out. Just for a bit of fun, let’s compare it to the reality.

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Even by the intellectual standards of the Scottish media, this is a stupid question:

But just to be helpful, we’ll answer it: by a majority of more than 500 votes is how.

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Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new World Speed-Reading Champion:

Almost 1200 words in 15 seconds is mighty impressive going in anyone’s book. (Either that or it’s REALLY slow for a 12-word tweet.) But we wondered if there might be any other reason why Mrs Angus Robertson wouldn’t want people reading that article.

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We’ve just been out for our evening constitutional in the relatively cool night air (Bath sweltered at an oppressive 30C today and Bear Patrol was pretty gruelling), and we thought readers might be interested in what we saw.

The city has observed lockdown with great diligence, as we’ve previously documented, and to be honest we’re not sufficiently familiar with the latest rules to say it wasn’t still doing so tonight. But a nearby park, around 9.30pm, was a disconcerting scene.

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The ramifications for Scottish politics of the failed stitch-up of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse have hardly begun to be felt. The Parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which formally began yesterday and is due to start interviewing people in August, looks set to be swamped in material – or at least, whatever material hasn’t been quietly and conveniently disposed of already – and nobody knows how long it’ll take to reach any sort of conclusion.

It seems a safe bet that the SNP leadership will be praying it doesn’t do so before the 2021 Holyrood election, for all sorts of reasons – not least that it appears beyond any credible doubt that Nicola Sturgeon lied to Parliament about the investigation.

But while Salmond was found innocent on every charge, he continues to be attacked from behind a shield of anonymity by the accusers that the mainly-female jury declined to believe, supported and co-ordinated by organisations funded almost entirely by the Scottish Government and with very close personal links to it.

So when we were putting out our latest Panelbase poll, we thought we’d find out what the people of Scotland thought about it.

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