Wings Over Scotland

Well, imagine our surprise.

There was very little realistic prospect of any other outcome, particularly in light of the same judge – Lady Haldane – ruling last month that the definition of “woman” was not limited to biological reality.

In doing so she placed it beyond any credible dispute that the Scottish Government’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Act did indeed impinge on equality law reserved to the UK government, because the rules on who constituted a legal man or woman would have been different in Scotland and England.

But what now for poor beleaguered Humza Yousaf?

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This is officially the most embarrassed to be Scottish we’ve ever been.

And we’re including both the 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony AND the time Craig Levein played 4-6-0 against the Czech Republic in that.

We have a government of clowns. Please, somebody, make it stop.

It’s not just the obvious tempting-fate part.

Yousaf himself has been demonstrating his unfitness for office ever since he’s had offices. But that’s not even the dumbest thing about that tweet.

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We held back from writing about yesterday’s judgment from Lady Dorrian in the Court Of Session in the hope that if we stared at it for long enough we could get it to make some kind of sense. But it does not. On the face of it, the country’s second-most-senior judge is simply a drooling imbecile.

Because that submission is not the least bit difficult to follow.

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Maybe he thinks Ash Denham and Ash Regan are two different people.

Still, consistency, honesty, decency and integrity: no great loss.

We were interested to read about this earlier this evening:

Not least because it was the first we’d heard about it. At the time of writing this post we’ve still had no communication from the Standards Commission to alert us to the judgement, which is frankly a bit of a poor show. We might file a complaint with the Standards Commission about it, depending on whether we can be bothered to wait another year and a quarter for the result.

We are of course pleased that the odious Cllr Joji has finally been formally censured for her obnoxious behaviour, but frankly she’s gotten off very lightly.

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We expected nothing better from Mhairi Hunter, of course, a once-decent human being corrupted by Nicola Sturgeon into an unthinking party drone.

But the reaction of the First Minister of Scotland to Ash Regan’s defection to Alba today is a sour, ugly and childish thing that would have been unworthy of the leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, never mind a serious grown-up in a position of power.

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It’s taken longer than we hoped and urged. But the SNP, having already lost one Parliamentarian to the Tories and kicked another one out for actually trying to achieve independence, has now lost one to a pro-indy party, with Ash Regan’s defection to Alba this afternoon.

(Which as far as we can tell is the first direct switch in Scottish Parliament history. Others have stood down to become independents, and subsequently stood for other parties, but nobody has moved straight from one party to another.)

We hope she’s only the first of many. Because the SNP is over. It has no credibility left either as a party of independence or a party of government, and anyone who stays on board the smoking wreck can have no complaints when they go down with it.

The average prison term for rape in Scotland is just under seven years. So we really don’t want to think about what Andrew “Amy George” Miller did to the poor young girl he abducted to get 20. (Indeed, strictly speaking 28.)

Miller wasn’t charged with rape, the 11-year-old was described as “safe and well” when the police found her and she was missing for just over one day. Miller also entered a guilty plea. So our blood runs cold at the thought of what must have happened in those 27 hours to nevertheless attract such a huge sentence, and we hope never to know.

But there are some things we DO want explained.

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This really is grim, folks. Remember the days when there had to be overflow rooms for the leader’s speech at the SNP conference, in venues holding thousands? Now they can’t come close to filling 750 seats in a 2000-seat arena.

The reception afforded to Sturgeon yesterday, who left the party in the pile of wreckage that the hapless Yousaf is still trying to stumble through, was a symptom of desperate people clinging forlornly to the shadow of better times, like an abandoned dog seeking the last bits of warmth and scent from its owner’s chair.

But those days are gone, never to return. This is the barren, foreboding autumn of the SNP, the cold ground thickly carpeted in the lifeless, crumbling and silent remains of lost members fallen from branches.

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