Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will have noticed something of a minor furore in recent days around a boneheaded Scottish Greens candidate (as if there were any other kind) calling for the complete abolition of prisons.

So far Kate Nevens – who on the latest polling has a very reasonable chance of being elected on the list – has resisted calls to step down, which is probably for the best as, incredibly, her replacement would be even worse.

With the implosion of Your Party concentrating the nutter vote firmly in Green hands, the next term of the Scottish Parliament is set to feature the worst array of MSPs in Holyrood’s history, with almost everyone in the SNP with any sort of ability or experience resigning to be replaced by hyper-obedient young party drones, while the opposition are mostly putting forward the same old faces who’ve been such utter failures for the last 20 years.

It’s a grim prospect, but we do have a solution to propose.

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The turnout at the “independence march and rally” yesterday was so abysmally poor that it seems almost unfair to pick on any of the scores of SNP elected representatives who didn’t bother to show up.

But dear old Cosy Feet Pete Wishart had the most chef’s-kiss excuse of all.

The reason he didn’t fancy getting his wee Billy Whizz quiff blown about a chilly Calton Hill was that he had important business “taking on the far right” – who were of course nowhere to be seen – with “half a million” (50,000) of his British besties, a convenient short Tube ride away from his London residence, at a pretty openly anti-Semitic protest called, with a double layer of delicious comedic value… UK Together.

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If events in Edinburgh today are anything to go by – when a march and rally announced with great fanfare seven months ago, backed by both the “independence” parties in the Scottish Parliament and featuring the First Minister as main speaker, attracted perhaps 1,500 people at the most to Calton Hill on a bright and sunny day – the independence movement faces an imminent final apocalypse.

So here’s how to prepare yourself for when the SNP win a landslide with 35%, Keir Starmer says “So what?” and then a deathly silence descends for another five years.

Even Kelly Given and Iona Fyfe didn’t show up for this one. That’s how bad it is.

The last faint hope of any remotely positive or at least interesting outcome of May’s election just left the building.

It wasn’t MUCH of a hope, and it’s absolutely no surprise in the wake of the comically shambolic, belief-defyingly inept farce that has been the birth of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s fringe-of-the fringe party, but all the same its extinguishing means the next two months will be even more of a waste of time than they looked like being.

Frankly, readers, we may as well not bother having an election at all.

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Posted without comment.

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A fascinating line from the BBC this evening:

The number of parties who got MSPs elected at the last election is… five. (Though in fairness there are now six, Reform having a single MSP after Graham Simpson defected from the Tories. The Lib Dems are even outnumbered by independents, of whom there are seven.)

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There is a not particularly funny joke that is sometimes told in legal circles about why a law student failed to finish his coursework – because he had no conviction. With rare exceptions lawyers aren’t renowned for their sense of humour but I can’t help thinking someone, at the highest levels of our justice system, is having a right laugh at my expense and those who have loyally supported me over the past six years.

I’m talking about the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC – a sitting member of the Scottish Government’s cabinet who was nominated by Nicola Sturgeon to that post in 2021, five months after I was acquitted.

For those unfamiliar with my case, I offer this brief summary. In March 2020 I made a short video on my mobile phone that was two minutes and thirty eight seconds in length. I hadn’t planned to make the video when I went out for a walk in a field near my home. But I was annoyed and wanted to articulate that annoyance, although at the time I recorded it I wasn’t intending for it to go much further.

Later that night, just before turning in, I uploaded it to my YouTube channel on a closed, unlisted link and then posted that link to my Twitter account that, at the time, had a modest 1000 or so followers. I then forgot about it.

Little did I know that short mobile phone video would result in me facing initially a criminal trial, then a five year legal battle in the highest civil court in Scotland and now, most likely, an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

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So on the one hand there’s obviously very little point paying attention to the SNP’s regional list candidates for May’s Holyrood election, because as this website has comprehensively demonstrated over recent months, the chances of the SNP having any list MSPs elected are remote.

However, nothing is impossible, so let’s take a look at the B team, which also serves as a guide to the party’s upcoming talent taking its first steps towards the gravy bus.

Well, that was even grimmer than expected.

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Cost of keeping vital rape crisis services in Glasgow operating: £500,000.

Amount of money wasted by the Scottish Government fighting and losing court cases to try to remove women’s rights: £1.14 million.

Angry yet?

In politics, readers, evil and stupidity aren’t the same thing.

But nor are they exclusive.

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Readers will probably be aware that literally as you read this, the Scottish Government is in court trying to defend its policy of letting male murderers be housed in women’s prisons by arguing that the Equality Act 2010 (as ruled on by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland case) is incompatible with the Human Rights Act 1998, implementing the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly referred to as the ECHR).

But this article isn’t about that case.

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This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

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