Wings Over Scotland

We were going to write something today for the anniversary of Alex Salmond’s tragic death, but then we read Kevin McKenna’s piece in today’s Herald On Sunday and we can’t improve on it, so go and have a read of that before you do anything else.

Alex always believed in looking forward, not back, so we doubt he’d be overly fussed at the pathetic “tribute” paid to him at the SNP conference this morning. What would undoubtedly have exercised him a lot more would have been the wretched current state of the party he loved and built from almost nothing into the dominant force in Scottish politics.

And nothing typifies that wretched state better than the craven and gutless capitulation of a speech given by Tommy Sheppard yesterday, opposing the rebel amendments to John Swinney’s non-strategy on independence.

It said a lot more than he thought it did, but none of it good.

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It’d be quite hard to find an image that more completely summed up the wretched state of the SNP in 2025 than this one. Look at that tiny handful of miserable faces, sitting dejectedly around a near-empty function room. It’s so bleak Mike Leigh could make an entire movie out of it.

And we know what you’re thinking – that we sat through some internet livestream to find the most pitiful-looking freezeframe imaginable to show them in a bad light. But nope. Kevin Stewart MSP posted this cheery snapshot of his own free will on Twitter on Sunday morning, presumably in the hope of boosting party morale in some way.

Because things really are grim.

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There’s an interesting piece in the Sunday Times today.

They’re not the only ones.

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I spent yesterday trying to work out exactly why I was so depressed about the fatal shooting of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk.

It wasn’t because I shared many of his opinions – other than opposition to gender ideology and DEI, and (surprisingly) support for Scottish independence, we had little in common. And it wasn’t general sadness about such a young man (31), a husband and a father to two preschool children, being so brutally slain. Because over 50 people are murdered every single day in the US alone and everyone just shrugs.

Nor was it even the fact that his death was captured in all its shocking, bloody horror on video, and inescapable on social media, nor that it came just the day after footage broke of another appalling killing in the States, the unprovoked stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic who’d been released on no-fee bail despite 14 previous arrests and should never have been at large.

Nor was it the grimly predictable emergence of the fact that Kirk’s shooter appears to have been a transactivist – America’s fastest-growing murderer demographic.

In the end, the most chilling thing about this particular crime is this: Charlie Kirk was killed for doing exactly what civilised people are supposed to do.

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We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.

Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.

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This is a remarkable thing.

The Scottish Greens, who until last year were a party of government, claim to have 7,600 members. This month they conducted an election to choose two people as their “co-conveners”, from a list of four candidates, and almost 90% of the party’s members decided that they didn’t want any of them.

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Over the last week or so we’ve gone into several sections of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir “Frankly” in some detail: what gender she really thinks Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham is, blaming JK Rowling for the toxic tone of the self-ID debate and explaining how she thinks the law should be changed to let transwomen into women’s spaces in future, her unquenchable jealousy of Alex Salmond and her failure to understand the basic functioning of the Scottish justice system, and finally her laughable denial of her evil but incompetent conspiracy against her predecessor.

(All of which she chose to accompany with a series of photographs that made her look like a sinister Cockney chav crime matriarch in a Guy Ritchie movie. She once dubbed herself Scotland’s “chief mammy”, but now comes across more like Ma Baker.)

But we’ve only just finished reading the whole book, so here’s the actual review.

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Scotland’s two main political parties have published their 2024 accounts. The SNP’s can be found here, and Scottish Labour’s here. Neither tells a massively inspiring tale.

(Click pics to enlarge.)

The SNP lost £445,000 despite being boosted by donations totalling almost £940,000 from just FOUR individuals. Scottish Labour made a profit of £350,000 but only because it was bailed out to the tune of £777,000 by the UK party, otherwise it would have made a very similar loss to the SNP’s (specifically £428,000).

Neither of those things are surprising, since 2024 was a UK general election year and those are when parties spend big. But the devil, as always, is in the details.

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Before becoming a politician Nicola Sturgeon had a brief and somewhat unsuccessful career in the world of law. Which means she has no excuse whatsoever for this:

Because in law, yes it does. That’s EXACTLY what it means.

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The media coverage of the gender-ideology revelations in Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir has been based on a couple of short sentences from it, but since the main section of the book devotes 14 pages to the subject it’s worth checking out in depth, at least until something more interesting happens.

Highly intelligent people only, obviously.

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There was one revealing moment in what was an otherwise nauseatingly sycophantic interview with Nicola Sturgeon by Adam Fleming on BBC2 last night.

And the thing it revealed is what Sturgeon’s book is really about. Because as more and more extracts have found their way into the public domain this week, the overarching theme of “Frankly” has become impossible to miss.

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