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.
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.
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.
On the face of it, this finding from our latest Panelbase poll isn’t very surprising:
But then again, maybe it is.
So, the good news today is that independence polling is finally back to where it was almost exactly four years ago – 26 June 2016, to be precise. Although we couldn’t help notice that The National’s front-page splash on the latest (re)surge was taking second billing in its readership stats to a day-old story about the First Minister’s haircut.
Now, as we noted earlier this month, that might just be down to people getting weary of false dawns. But it might also indicate that a measure of realism is belatedly beginning to dawn on the Yes movement about the lack of connection between nice poll numbers and actually securing another referendum.
We had a little mini-poll out with Panelbase this week, readers. Given that the SNP are currently still insisting that they need ANOTHER mandate at the ballot box to secure a second independence referendum (by our count that would be the tenth), we thought we’d see how many people believed this cunning plan would work.
The results, we suspect, will not amaze you.
Scottish voters, it turns out, aren’t completely stupid.
We’ve often said on Wings Over Scotland that we really don’t mind if journalists are biased. Everyone is biased, including us – we’d just rather people stopped pretending to be impartial when they weren’t. But what we do really hate about the Scottish media is just how astonishingly bad at its job it is.
A particularly striking example arose recently.
Pretty much every newspaper and broadcaster in the country carried the sad story of former Labour MP Paul Sweeney‘s fall from besuited lawmaker to skint benefits claimant. And yet not a single one of them asked the question that literally every single reader of the story would have been shouting at their screen.
Good news, everyone – there’s been another surge.
Go back to your constituencies and prepare for indyref2! Yes, again.
We’re STILL officially on holiday, readers, and that means that for the last four months we’ve barely watched the news or looked at a newspaper, because who wants to be depressed by being lied to by a never-ending parade of scumbags when they’re on holiday? Not us, and we’ll tell you that for nothing.
So we’re grateful to alert readers who still point us to stuff like this.
EIGHT YEARS since Scottish Labour got into bed with the Tories to ensure the Tories kept ruling Scotland, and they still haven’t grasped why they don’t get the “protect us from the Tories” vote any more. Honestly, folks, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious.
Some in the independence movement got quite excited yesterday about a widely-reported poll showing that 63% of Scots want a new indyref in the next five years. It reminded us that we’d had a question on the subject in our own Panelbase poll earlier this month that we hadn’t got around to talking about.
Because of what we wanted to find out, that question was asked in a slightly strange way, so let’s quickly explain.
In a shock finding that’s sure to provoke soul-searching and recriminations at SNP HQ, it appears that the Scottish Government actually has a new policy that’s backed by a majority of the Scottish public.
Honestly, we were as surprised as you.
There’s a great quote from one of the founders of the SNP that Yes types are fond of using in response to the endless onslaught of brainless Unionist accusations that the independence movement is “anti-English”.
But we had no suspicion of just how remarkably true it was until now.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
