The SNP constitution states that a leadership election should take place over a period of four and a half months. Having not had one in almost 20 years, the SNP are now to conduct one from start to finish in the space of four and a half weeks.
The voting period of two weeks (who needs two weeks to vote after three weeks of debate?) means that it’ll be over just a week too late for the party to be able to hold its “special democracy conference” to determine its independence strategy for the next couple of years, but also that the new leader will be in place just in time to file a legal challenge over the Gender Recognition Reform bill before the April deadline.
(Something the party president Mike Russell publicly called for today, in an apparent attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Indeed, he called for candidates not to go back on ANY of the outgoing leader’s policies, which rather invites the question of why they should bother electing a new leader at all.)
Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland’s press this morning that despite her weariness, she could have managed a few more months or even a year as First Minister, which would at least have got her halfway to keeping her promise to serve a full term if she was elected in 2021.
Which just makes her timing all the harder to explain.
We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.
As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.
There are terms beloved of politics activists and commonly used on social media which are a baffling mystery to the general public. We’ve spoken several times of the word “gaslighting”, which is understandably used as shorthand for quite a complex thing that’s difficult to describe concisely, but nevertheless acts as a barrier to understanding for anyone not overly political.
Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:
Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.
Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.
But isn’t that the Scottish Greens co-leader in that picture, in the bunnet, between his colleague Ross Greer and Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, all enthusiastically clapping Douglas just a few weeks ago?
Diligently alert readers may have noticed that the SNP MP, former vomit-mopper and permanent embarrassment to braincells Stewart McDonald has an article in today’s National about the best way to look like he’s trying to secure independence without risking losing his cosy lucrative job in glamorous London with all his fancy MP pals.
(McDonald is also one of the party’s most virulent advocates of its massively unpopular gender reforms, which isn’t relevant to anything but we’ve got a streak to maintain.)
Unfortunately it’s 4,000 words long and unbearably boring, but since you pay us we’ve taken the bullet for you, read the whole thing and now present it here in précis form:
People across Scotland breathed a sigh of relief this morning when missing Galashiels 11-year-old Kaitlyn Easson was found safe and well after a multi-service search.
The police have arrested[EDIT: and now charged] a 53-year-old man in connection with her disappearance, named by the Daily Record as Andrew Miller, a local butcher. This was one of two names that numerous sources had been passing to Wings since the man was detained, but the two names only referred to one person.
