Wings Over Scotland

As more and more of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs ooze out into the public sphere like pus leaking from a burns-victim’s blisters, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of rank, festering untruth spreading out in all directions.

First she audaciously attempted to blame Alex Salmond for supposedly leaking the news of his own arrest on false sexual-assault charges to the press, a laughably mad allegation totally derided by everyone involved including the journalist the story was leaked to (by Sturgeon’s own chief of staff, Liz Lloyd).

For good measure she then accused the MSPs investigating her conspiracy against him of being mere puppets controlled and directed by Salmond, an obvious nonsense immediately refuted by them directly, in case the idea of Murdo Fraser taking orders from Alex Salmond wasn’t already too idiotic to contemplate.

And her spewing sewage cannon still wasn’t done, managing to dredge up another smear that Salmond had been secretly opposed to equal marriage in 2012, an assertion so laughably obviously disproved by entire truckloads of evidence that making it can only have been a result of the gravest desperation.

(Or perhaps pure jealousy that Pink News never made HER their “Ally Of The Year”, as they did with both Salmond and David Cameron.)

But even so, this might be the boldest Hail Mary attempt of all.

Because even for Nicola Sturgeon, trying to rewrite time itself is an ambitious move.

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Say what you like about Nicola Sturgeon, but she’s not stupid. Releasing her memoirs when the Scottish Parliament is in recess has ensured acres of media coverage for what so far have been extremely anodyne “revelations” bundled up with barefaced and obvious lies of such startling audacity that it’s almost impossible to discuss them rationally. (Which is of course the point.)

But this extract from an interview to be aired on ITV tonight is actually interesting.

In it, Sturgeon doggedly continues to refuse to use male pronouns for multiple rapist Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, despite admitting that he IS male, instead calling him “they”. But it was the bit before that that raised our eyebrows.

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We’ve written a couple of articles about the media coverage of this already, but as the slow summer season continues it’s worth taking a little time to have a proper look at the source material, because it’s your cash that’s being spent on it, and used to shape public policy in Scotland.

And it’s very hard to overstate both what a waste of money, and what a colossal insult to every woman in Scotland, it represents.

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A little over two years ago, three SNP MSPs contested the leadership of the party in the wake of the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. All were full of grand plans and dreams for the future of the party, the nation and the independence movement.

None of the three is leader now, and in nine months’ time none of them will be SNP MSPs. Indeed, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none will be an MSP at all.

And that, readers, is not a sign of a party – or indeed a Parliament – in good health.

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It can be very hard to follow the arguments of people trying to convince you to vote for the SNP on the regional list at next year’s election. Here’s one just a month ago:

So that’s clear – indy supporters MUST IGNORE the “siren voices” telling them to vote for smaller indy parties, because they can’t win any seats and therefore to vote for them is to “throw away” your list vote.

And this was them just two weeks ago, strenuously insisting that the small parties were a busted flush and there was no chance of a “non-SNP route to independence”:

So it was a bit confusing to read this yesterday:

Because all of a sudden, it seems that you CAN vote for the smaller indy parties, regardless of whether they win seats or not, because the list vote will actually be a de-facto referendum and the votes will still count. And indeed, apparently you SHOULD do so, because an SNP-only route – the thing which was the only hope a fortnight ago – is now “totally unachievable” and ONLY working in concert with the smaller indy parties can succeed.

Heavens, what huge transformative event did we miss?

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These two Sunday front pages three weeks apart sounded awfully similar.

But it turned out to be a lot worse than we thought.

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When we get bored in the summer silly season, we often start poking around in stats. This week we’d been pondering the complete waste of everyone’s time Anas Sarwar’s four and a half years in charge of Scottish Labour have been, and the open goal he’s missed in failing to capitalise on a period of constant chaos and turmoil for the SNP.

That got us to thinking about which leaders in the Scottish Parliament era have made a significant difference (in either direction) to the fortunes of their parties, and from there it was pretty short work to illustrate it in the form of a graph.

It rather leaps out at you, doesn’t it?

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There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.

“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.

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No, wait, hear us out.

It’s not what you think.

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At some point, we’re all going to have to have a discussion about the word “normal”.

Because suffering from a debilitating mental illness that supposedly causes you to commit suicide if medical professionals don’t pump you full of wrong-sex hormones and/or mutilate or remove healthy and functioning parts of your body, and which affects no more than 1 in 300 people, is NOT, in fact, “completely normal”. Nor is having a physical disorder affecting less than 1 in 5,000 people. They’re the exact opposite of that. They’re extremely abnormal.

(“Abnormal” is not an intrinsically pejorative term, it’s a simple neutral statement of fact, meaning something that’s uncommon or unusual.)

But that’s not the main problem with NHS Fife’s “LGBTQI+” website.

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For the combatants in the gender wars, it’s been quite a spring and summer here in the TERF Island theatre of battle.

In February, polling company YouGov revealed the vast extent to which public opinion has shifted around the issue (significantly though not entirely in the wake of the Cass Review last April), which we reported on via a snazzy Stalingrad metaphor. But just as with Stalingrad, it was only the precursor to the recapture of territory on an epic scale.

So let’s recap what we’ve won and what it means.

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You might think you’ve heard this tired old song before.

But wait! This one’s streamlined! Come back!

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