Not Listening 178
The primary character trait of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is not listening.
The primary character trait of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is not listening.
…simply don’t ask the question.
And the problem will magically go away.
Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you back once again to the only event in politics that’s more frequent than a Scottish Labour leadership election.
Seems to come round sooner every year, doesn’t it?
We’re bored of this story now but this was too good to ignore:
Sir Humphrey would be proud.
Nine days ago Wings told you this:
And you’ll never guess what’s happened.
I’m bemused that The National is now dragging up a nine-day old story for no apparent reason other than to assist the SNP in its determined recent attempts to smear my site.
But I’m extremely disappointed that in doing so it’s chosen to ignore a document I sent to your previous reporter, Emer O’Toole, more than a week ago, proving the accuracy of my leak.
Writing about the Hate Crime Bill in the Herald today, Kevin McKenna summarises in a sentence a point this website has been making for many months.
Because the real question about the SNP’s sudden demented obsession with focusing the public’s attention on its most unpopular policies right before supposedly the most important election in its history isn’t “Why?”
It’s “Why now?”
Last week we warned you to beware of poll questions containing the formulation “Does [X] make you more or less likely to vote in a certain way?”, and this evening Survation have provided us with an example of why.
According to those numbers, the conflict between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon has caused a staggering 47% of Scots to change their likelihood of voting Yes in an independence referendum. And the bulk of those – 37% – say it’s made them MUCH more or MUCH less likely to vote Yes.
Those numbers break by more than 2 to 1 (23% to 11%) in favour of “much less likely”, which is a margin of change (12 points) bigger than almost any Yes majority that’s ever been recorded in a poll.
In other words, if the poll is to be believed, Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to neutralise Alex Salmond as a threat to her personal political power has almost definitely turned a Yes vote into a No vote as people have started paying attention to it.
Someone forwarded a Freedom Of Information response to us today. It’s frighteningly illustrative of the kind of Scotland that the SNP are bringing into being.
We’re assuming, naturally, that the First Minister will be duly suspended from the SNP while these shocking allegations are fully investigated, just like Gareth Wardell, Denise Findlay, Neale Hanvey, Mark McDonald, Michelle Thomson, Neil Hay, etc etc etc were.
We’re not, of course. And nor should she be, because “shared a platform with” is the ugly ginger stepchild of fake-outrage cancel culture – lower on the smear scale even than “liked a tweet by” or “linked an article by someone who completely separately had an unfashionable opinion on a completely different subject several years ago”. It’s absolute guff punted only by scumbags.
Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact is that those are precisely the crimes for which other people WERE suspended and/or ostracised from the party, and we can’t help wishing the SNP’s flagrant hypocrisy about it was just a little bit less obvious and less arrogantly blatant, so that it wasn’t quite so painfully offensive to any decent person, and so that we weren’t having to fight quite so hard to keep believing in independence when we see the grim state of the Scotland that’s taking shape before our eyes.
But hey, we are where we are.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.