Wings Over Scotland

Last night the Labour MSP James Kelly – who was resoundingly rejected by voters in Rutherglen earlier this month but was forced on the Scottish Parliament anyway by his party – appeared on Scotland Tonight to debate the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act. You can see the full segment from 15m 35s here.

Mr Kelly told a number of quite serious lies. We’ve edited them together.

Let’s examine them in turn.

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It must be bewildering being the SNP sometimes.

You win a historic third election with a second massive landslide, getting more than twice as many seats as your nearest challenger – the first time such a thing has ever happened in a Holyrood election – on the back of what’s (self-evidently) by and large a very popular policy programme and record, and before you’ve even taken your seats in the chamber all the parties you just thrashed out of sight line up to explain how you’ve been doing everything wrong.

And as alliances go, they don’t get much less holy.

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We’re still on a break. But we’ve had another response from the BBC.

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We’re supposed to be taking a few days off, but it’s been tipping it down outside for 36 solid hours, so when an alert reader emailed us a question relating to this article from Monday, we couldn’t help but go and research it just to pass some time.

They’d asked how many of the Tory MSPs elected last Thursday had been rejected by the voters of a constituency seat on the same day, and we were startled by the answer – of the 24 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament elected on the list last week, every single one was also a failed constituency candidate.

And that got us thinking.

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In amongst a torrent of pretty mad analysis of the election result at the weekend, we noticed the most insane reason yet suggested for the loss of the SNP’s majority:

The co-founder of a much-lauded but little-read pro-independence website asserted that the SNP were cruising to victory until the Nats got the backing of the Scottish Sun and Nicola Sturgeon was pictured posing with the front cover endorsing her party.

The whole litany of gaping flaws in that argument is something the Yes movement has needed to talk about for some considerable time now. So let’s bite the bullet and do it.

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We’ll just leave this here:

Actual percentage of female MSPs returned in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election:

Labour 46%, SNP 43%, Conservative 19%, Green 16%, Lib Dem 0%.

Hmm.

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The social-media reaction to this post yesterday was astonishing. Merely pointing out calmly and quietly that our warnings before the election had been entirely vindicated, and that everyone else’s unequivocal assertions of a guaranteed SNP majority had been the rubbish we always said they were, unleashed a torrent of abuse equal to any we’ve ever endured in the last four and a half years – distinguished only by the fact that so much of this one came from supposed Yes supporters.

But no amount of screaming and shouting will change the facts. Let’s look at them.

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The first (and from our perspective, most important) thing to note is that independence is now categorically and unequivocally off the table for at least half a decade.

The failure of the SNP to secure another Holyrood majority last night (for the want of just 360 votes) combined with the Greens’ weasel-worded opposition to a second referendum – and make no mistake, opposition is what it is – will ensure that even if the rUK votes to leave the EU and Scotland votes overwhelmingly to stay in, there will be no indyref before the next Holyrood election in 2021.

Whatever else happens, you can take that to the bank.

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Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

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During this election campaign, there’ve been the usual bouts of political sparring, the tit-for-tat point-scoring frenzy played out through a plethora of media. One particular battleground, though, had a special resonance for me – the “Named Person” scheme.

I’m a former “looked-after” child. I’ve suffered the abuse and neglect that this scheme is intended to help protect children from. Having scrutinised the details for myself, I fully support it.

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The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.

That was a quick switch.

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