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?
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.
We took the day off today because we didn’t trust ourselves to watch the Hate Crime Bill debate without doing something violent. By all accounts it was the smart call.
While the debate overran and will conclude with a vote tomorrow, there’s no suspense about the outcome. With the backing of the snivelling, hateful, misogynist Greens (one female MSP out of six, entirely by choice), the bill will pass and Scotland will become a country where almost anything you say could be a hate crime.
The bill is designed to terrify normal people into silence about almost any subject, as an automatic habit. Even in your own home you won’t be safe from denunciation.
And while an amendment by Adam Tomkins of the Scottish Tories – it has come to the stage, readers, where we’re reduced to needing the Tories to try to save us from the SNP – should help a lot of people escape being convicted, that’s not even the point. Malicious, vexatious complaints will have put them through months of worry and fear, effectively punishing them even though they’re innocent, and most people – especially women – will simply hold their tongue to avoid the trauma.
For the last couple of years this site has been critical of the SNP’s failure to make any sort of progress on independence. But this is far, far worse even than that. Because if they somehow miraculously achieved independence tomorrow, we’d be afraid to live in the Scotland they’re creating.
Our country doesn’t have a SINGLE political party remotely fit for government. Voters in May face a choice between the evil, the stupid, and the evil and stupid. And they can’t even be angry about it, because even the politest anger is now a hate crime.
We wish we had a constructive course of action to suggest to you, folks. But we don’t, because democracy has failed you. There is no way you can vote that will fix the ruins the SNP have made of Scotland. We cannot see a way forward. It is becoming nearly impossible to evade the conclusion that all is lost. Nicola Sturgeon has destroyed it.
When we suggested yesterday that the SNP was turning into New Labour, we didn’t expect them to go to quite so much trouble to provide us with a timely illustration.
In happier times, almost seven years ago, a united and focused Yes movement had a bit of fun at the expense of Labour MP Ian Murray when he had a huge pearl-clutching fainting fit over someone putting a couple of stickers on his constituency office.
Record-scratch and jump-cut to the 2021 SNP.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
