Wings Over Scotland

As alert readers will have noticed, Wings has been perusing the SNP’s Governance And Transparency Review over the last couple of days, a document which tentatively attempts to discern just how big a mess the party’s previous leadership has left it in.

(SPOILER: a really big one.)

The paper has now also reached the mainstream media.

Wings already touched on that particular aspect of the party’s mismanagement back in August, but in the light of the report now formally acknowledging the problem it’s worth taking a moment to establish just how astonishingly bad it is.

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This is the end of Humza Yousaf’s speech to the SNP conference today.

And if you examine what those words mean, the conclusion couldn’t be clearer.

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Well, we must admit we didn’t see that one coming.

Although maybe it’s just because over the last few years the concept of an SNP MP having any sort of principles has become so wildly implausible.

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The parasite infestation within the SNP has sensed its moment has arrived.

The final act of hostile takeover is almost upon us.

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Labour won far more handsomely in last night’s by-election than anyone – and we very strongly suspect that includes themselves – expected. If the swing of over 20% was to be repeated nationwide next year (which it won’t be, but we’ll get to that in a minute), the SNP would be reduced to six or seven seats, as Wings has predicted for a while.

From the abject pit of despair of 2015, when Labour lost 40 of its 41 MPs in Scotland, let’s look at how the party has powered back to recapture the hearts of voters.

Wait, what?

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Humza Yousaf didn’t turn up to the count tonight. In the end, even on a dreadfully low turnout of 37%, Labour won by 9,446 votes, with more than twice as many as the SNP.

It was a much worse defeat for the governing party than most expected. There should be only one outcome.

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After months of phony war, we’re actually about to find out something concrete about the current state of Scottish politics.

The omens aren’t massively auspicious.

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I’ve known my mate Chris since I was five years old and we lived next door to each other in a council scheme in Bathgate. He’s a grand lad, the sort of Rangers fan that you can introduce in polite company, a hardworking, small-c-conservative successful business owner who’d go out of his way to help you and has a few SNP councillors in his social circle.

He isn’t the least bit political. In 2014 he was a soft No whose vote was narrowly tipped by the fact that his company did almost all of its business with English clients and he feared losing them to red tape (and, ironically, English nationalist sentiment) after indy, but after the Brexit referendum he was leaning very much more Yes.

The SNP’s staggeringly incompetent rule since then blew that chance and has pushed him further back into the No camp than he ever had been before, but last night he texted me “can’t believe this actually went to print and came through our door today”.

I can’t say I blame him.

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I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.

They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.

There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:

(Warning: some adult content.)

Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.

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Well, there it is.

It’s not like it hasn’t been coming.

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These are strange and grim times for the Scottish independence movement, but we never thought it’d ever get so strange that we’d be quoting Effie Deans.

Since pretty much day one, Wings has said that the only honest and honourable way to campaign against independence would be for Unionists to say Scotland isn’t a country, but a mere region of the UK. But they lack the courage to admit what their true beliefs are, and so they fall back on fear and lies disguised as concern, all cloaked in “proud Scot” protestations.

While that might be a miserable way to conduct yourself, it’s understandable, because the moment that you acknowledge Scotland as being a country, all the debating lines against independence crumble to ashes. They’re powerless in the face of the principle that countries should choose their own governments, for good or ill, because that’s what democracy is, and few people are willing to stand openly against democracy.

And what Effie Deans’ concession of this site’s cornerstone argument reveals is that Unionists finally feel safe against any threat of independence in the foreseeable future, and with good reason.

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So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.

It’s smaller than we imagined.

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