Wings Over Scotland

On 5 April 2021, I sent a short and simple Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to the Scottish Government asking for:

“All written evidence to James Hamilton’s QC investigation into the FM under the ministerial code. This includes evidence from the FM, her chief of staff Liz Lloyd and any other individuals within the Scottish Government who have submitted evidence.”

Over four and a half years later, because of the government’s pathological aversion to transparency and accountability, we’re still not there.

But we’re inching closer.

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For several years now, this site has recorded how the SNP’s continued existence is now entirely dependent on UK state funding. The party would simply go bust without Westminster money. And how precarious a position that puts it in is sharply illustrated by the latest release of donations income from the Electoral Commission.

In a 12-month period running up to the last UK general election, the UK state gave the SNP a little over £1.3 million.

In the corresponding period for the last year, after the party was reduced to just nine seats, that figure plunged to just over £0.4 million, a drop of over £0.9 million.

And that’s money the SNP can’t afford to lose.

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For lack of anything more interesting to write about, we thought we might do a monthly rundown of polling in the leadup to next year’s Holyrood election, with seat projections from a neutral source, in the shape of the newish Devolved Elections website.

And very quickly, things got a bit weird.

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Oh good, another plan. Just three and a half years to wait.

Should we, what’s the phrase, “Save The Date”?

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It’s Wings’ 14th birthday today, and to be entirely honest with you, readers, like a lot of teenagers we’re having a bit of an existential crisis. It’s quite difficult to see any point in being a Scottish political journalist for the next five years, because it’s just going to be one depressing Groundhog Day after another.

So rather than moan on as usual, today we’re handing over to a precocious new talent whose enthusiasm can’t be dimmed. It’s one that garnered a lot of attention this week by delivering a comprehensive and very entertaining spanking to SNP MP and devoted friend of the site Pete “Cosy Feet” Wishart. 

Wishart threw such a petulant strop that he accused a code algorithm of defamation and threatened legal action against the inanimate collection of 1s and 0s.

With skills like that already placing it well beyond the abilities of most of the Scottish political commentariat, we thought we’d give it a tryout and ask it to take a look into the country’s future.

The following article is completely unedited other than a bit of formatting, though we did ask it (with only partial success) to tone down the haggis-and-bagpipes stuff slightly from its first draft. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Grok. Unlike most journos, it provided links and it did write its own headline.

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This really is an extraordinary headline, for multiple reasons.

Because what actually IS “the rise of Reform”?

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Perhaps the key graphic from last night’s by-election in Caerphilly is this one (green means Plaid Cymru in the context of Wales):

In the end, Plaid won pretty comfortably in what had been predicted to be a very tight contest between them and Reform, with a majority of almost 4,000. But Plaid aren’t going to be the next government of the UK, so what’s the real story?

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Last month, when half a football team of armed police ambushed and arrested comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport for a couple of tweets, we said this:

Today, even more swiftly than we thought, this happened:

Rarely can a hand have been overplayed so badly.

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We should point out right at the start that a reader donated £12 back in the summer specifically to send us to Nicola Sturgeon’s book event in Bath last night.

We assume it was someone we’d upset in some way.

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So on the surface level this is just flat-out hilarious.

Firstly because, as we showed you yesterday, the “significant proportion of Scotland’s population” which appears to have been won back to the SNP since John Swinney became its leader is… 1%.

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All of the words you’re about to read below were written by the same person in the last few days. It’s completely verbatim and none of it is taken in any way out of context. It means what it sounds like it means.

But even if you’ve got a forehead the size of the “eggheads” from the famous Tefal ads of the 1980s, you’ll never guess the big reveal at the end.

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Kevin McKenna has a piece in today’s Herald asking the question that is now the core issue for the Scottish independence movement.

The short version of the answer is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled”. But that does nothing to explain the fool’s mindset to us, or help devise a way to get them to accept it.

To some degree that’s because – as we saw so starkly in the “NO DEBATE!” tactics of the gender ideologly cult – part of the problem is that the built-in defence mechanism of the fooled is something George Orwell described in “1984”:

“CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”

What that means in practice is that the fooled never reflect on their own behaviour, far less enter into a meaningful discussion of it. In Orwell’s dystopian Oceania, that was to save them from torture and death at the hands of the Thought Police. More often nowadays, it’s simply to avoid humiliation on social media.

Either way, it’s vanishingly rare to hear someone elaborate on why they’re choosing to remain fooled. Which is why we’re so lucky today.

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