Wings Over Scotland

Labour sub-faction the Scottish Fabians this weekend published a call for “a new Act Of Union”, an idea that’s been kicking around in the party for some time since failed branch office manager Kezia Dugdale came up with it in 2016.

And at first it sounds almost intelligent and democratic, proposing a clearly defined path by which any of the four constituent nations of the UK could become independent.

But then you get to the small print.

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It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.

Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.

To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.

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So we guess this is an answer to our question:

But there are many more questions.

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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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