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.
The practical reason why it’s a bad idea to cave in to bullies – as well as the morality of doing so – is that they see it as weakness and don’t respect you for it, and as such they won’t show you any gratitude should you need their support in future.
And so we return to the Scottish football authorities and “Rangers”.
It’s pretty interesting that today marks the first really tangible diversification between the Scottish and UK governments with regard to the coronavirus crisis: the Holyrood administration has rejected Westminster’s much-criticised new main slogan and will be sticking with the old “STAY HOME” message.
(Here at Wings we’re mainly upset that the extremely misguided new campaign will undermine our years-old pro-alertness position.)
Because what our latest Panelbase poll showed is that there’s a huge gulf between perception and reality in Scotland when it comes to virus strategy.
It’s becoming quite remarkable how often the concerted attempts from within the Yes movement to silence the world’s biggest pro-independence website coincide with it being about to say things the cult of transgenderism doesn’t want people to hear.
And with that, on to our latest Panelbase poll results.
This site used to have a running joke about the number of times the Scottish media screamed “SNP CIVIL WAR!” whenever any two people in the party – one of whom would invariably be either Jim Sillars or Gordon Wilson – disagreed with each other about whether you should put the milk or the boiling water in a cup of tea first.
Well, here’s what a real one looks like.
We’re so underwhelmed and nonplussed by this information that to be honest it barely even occurred to us to write it up, but here we go anyway:
Today a mostly-female jury drawn from the most Unionist city in Scotland and directed by a female judge delivered the only verdict it was credibly possible to reach on the (total absence of) evidence before it: that Alex Salmond was not guilty of any crime.
After two weeks hearing an assortment of lurid allegations from former friends and colleagues hidden behind cloaks of public anonymity, the jury – having been advised by the prosecuting counsel that they were the sole arbiters of fact – decided that there was no truth to them.
Since the two most serious charges, in particular, were both matters of the accuser’s word against that of the accused, and the two parties gave completely irreconcilable accounts of the facts (rather than competing interpretations of agreed events), it can only be the case that one side was lying absolutely, and the jury decided that it was the anonymous accusers who were doing so.
It remains to see whether there will be a legal reckoning for those lies. But more than one sort of reckoning will surely follow from these events.
There are now exactly two weeks remaining of the Scottish Government’s second fake “consultation” into its proposed reforms to gender law.
We say “fake” not out of cynicism or mad paranoia, but because the cabinet minister responsible for the reforms has already made it explicitly, publicly and repeatedly clear that she intends to press ahead with them regardless of the responses, and that the only purpose of the “consultation” is to try to persuade people to agree with them.
Shirley-Anne Somerville reiterated this position just days ago, telling Scotland Tonight that she was “absolutely determined” to enact the bill and only interested in silencing opposition and removing any “medicalisation” of the process of gender transition.
While the Scottish Government has met literally hundreds of times with transactivist groups with regard to the reforms, it has refused to meet women’s groups critical of them, and frequently lied about that refusal.
(It also funds transactivist pressure groups with hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money to create a “feedback loop” supporting its position. Gender-critical women’s groups receive no such funding, largely because the conditions attached to Scottish Government funding specifically and deliberately exclude them.)
The consultation document and the draft bill leave enormous logical and legislative gaps which are likely to cause untold chaos if the reforms are implemented. The Scottish Government has apparently learned nothing from the shambolic fiascos around the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act and Named Person legislation, both of which have collapsed despite widespread public support – something the proposed gender reforms emphatically do NOT enjoy.
We’re obliged for the sake of sanity to assume that at some point the First Minister, the Cabinet Secretary or both will have to undertake at least one proper interview on the subject of these extremely serious and potentially catastrophic proposals.
For the consideration of whoever may conduct these interviews, we submit below some questions which a very considerable number of people in Scotland – primarily but by no means exclusively women, and encompassing a majority of every political and social demographic – urgently want answered.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
