Wings Over Scotland

We’ve just taken delivery of some REALLY interesting polling results, readers, but it’s going to take a while to fully analyse and write them up, so in the meantime let’s look at some slightly less interesting ones which came from the same poll – the Norstat one commissioned by the Sunday Times and published today, which we hitched a lift on.

The headline figures show an eight-point Yes lead, which is nice, although it’s also entirely abstract since the SNP has no current policy for translating independence support into actual independence (or even another referendum about it).

All the same, it seemed a good time to assess the wider picture.

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If you’re a fan of lazy, superficial political analysis from the mentally unwell, you might have read this week about John Swinney’s great strategic triumph of having “coaxed” an “endorsement” out of the Daily Record for Thursday’s by-election in Hamilton.

And if so, you might be forgiven for thinking that that analysis looks pretty stupid now.

(Holiday Boy is still jetting his way around the globe, and indeed will be for the next few weeks, so in the absence of cartoons what else can we do but look at comics?)

But what, if anything, do those front pages tell us?

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Alert readers will be familiar with this site’s ongoing quest for an explanation as to why controversy-plagued charity LGBT Youth Scotland continues to operate in dozens of Scottish primary and even nursery schools, pushing gender ideology onto children as young as four despite only having a remit to support 13-25-year-olds.

Last month we were, to coin a phrase, stonewalled by Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR, but we filed a review request and today we received – a couple of weeks past the deadline – a response.

Below is a quick video of it.

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The entire Scottish media and professional-politician community is currently in a self-righteous froth about a campaign ad being run by Reform for the Hamilton by-election targeting Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.

Obviously none of the acres of press coverage trusts voters to see the ad and decide for themselves, because that simply isn’t how journalism works nowadays. You’re told that a bad thing happened – whether it be a campaign ad, a comedian’s joke or the supposed terrible abuse sent to a celebrity – and how outraged various pundits or other celebrities are about it, with the clear implication that you should feel the same, but you almost never get shown or told what was actually said.

So to start with, as a basic journalistic principle, here’s the ad itself in its entirety.

Now let’s look at what you’re being ordered to think about it.

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Whoever advised John Swinney to do this should be tarred, feathered and fired.

Because incredibly, the sheer abject patheticness of it isn’t even the biggest problem.

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We were a bit bemused by this yesterday.

The Scottish Tory MSP reacted furiously to a story in The National which said Scotland had been absorbed into England by the 1707 Act Of Union, rather than becoming a “partner” in anything, and had ceased to exist as a state in international law.

Which was a weird response, because that’s been the official stated position of both the UK government and the Conservative Party for at least the last 12 years.

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Despite everything, we almost allowed ourselves just the very tiniest little micro-flicker of optimism when we read Tommy Sheppard’s latest in The National.

Because that much is certainly true, and it’s uncommonly candid to have anyone in the SNP admit it. So what’s the answer?

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Not for us, admittedly.

(Kelly’s article is here. Link to Grok’s answer here. The ChatGPT analysis that triggered the article can be read in this tweet thread. A verifiable analysis by Grok of the debate, based on a neutral question, can be read here.)

In so far as it’s worth talking about Scottish constitutional politics at all these days, it’s worth taking a moment to analyse the bloodless, anodyne nothingness spouted by the First Minister on The Sunday Show at the weekend.

That clip is less than three minutes long, but it’s so soul-crushingly boring and full of content-free drone and waffle that it’s almost impossible to sit all the way through it, so we’re going to translate and summarise it for you.

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Warning: despite the quite zingy title this is actually going to be a very dry stats post, readers. It is, on the other hand, based on a man having something disturbingly close to a complete psychotic mental breakdown, so there’s always that for a bit of colour.

Because the paragraph above, and in particular the highlighted part, is without a doubt the most dishonest, diametrically false and wildly extreme lie about Scottish politics that we’ve ever seen anyone tell in the 13.5 years of Wings Over Scotland’s existence.

And folks, that’s a high bar.

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Social media was having a good chuckle at this earlier today.

But as it turns out, it’s a bit more than just an embarrassment.

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The deranged stalker who’s now posted 72 blogposts totalling 62,500 words attacking Wings in the last few years had another go last night, over this.

And as a rule we don’t bother addressing them because they’re so demented you could spend 5,000 words pulling apart all the individual strands of lunacy every time, and lunatics thrive on attention, but this one does merit a very brief comment.

Because “Vote Labour, get indy” wasn’t our plan. It was John Swinney’s.

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