Wings Over Scotland

First Minister’s Questions was very interesting today. Ruth Davidson had some tricky ones which Nicola Sturgeon simply didn’t even attempt to look like she was answering, and we might come back to one of them in particular a little later on.

But Jackie Baillie’s were even more pointed, especially this one:

With our trademark scrupulous fairness we’ve included the full question and answer, and they raise a whole series of issues, but if you’re in a hurry the key part we want to talk about right now is between 0.18 and 0.26.

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Iain Macwhirter has a good column on the farcical Fabiani inquiry in the Herald today. But one piece of it really jumped out at us.

Wait, what?

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Do ye, aye?

Well, yer ontae plums, son.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s barely six months since grassroots SNP members rushed to the defence of Glasgow Cathcart MSP James Dornan when it looked like the party’s woke wing had pushed him out of his seat for electoral vampire Rhiannon Spear.

The loud uproar over a crooked NEC meeting that effectively deselected Dornan – the same one that stitched up Joanna Cherry – saw him reinstated as candidate, although the decision over Cherry wasn’t reversed. But the warning shot across Dornan’s bows clearly worked, because look at the state of him now.

Ever since the summer fiasco Dornan has been the most obsequiously loyal follower of the leadership in the entire party, but today’s tweet is a new low.

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There’s currently a rather large and somewhat embarrassing vacancy at the top of the Yes movement. You may wish to be part of an organisation which includes some very good people seeking to do something about it.

In which case you should click on the image above.

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The tl;dr is that Martin Keatings has lost his case over the Scottish Parliament’s right or otherwise to hold an independence referendum. Lady Carmichael in essence declined to make a decision over Holyrood’s authority to order any future vote, agreeing with the defenders in deeming the matter to be “hypothetical, academic and premature”.

We obviously haven’t yet had time to digest the full 72-page judgement, issued about an hour ago, and in any event aren’t really equipped to understand its dense legalese.

But there’s one thing we do understand.

Keatings was opposed by an alliance of the Advocate General for Scotland (despite his title, a representative of the UK government) and the Lord Advocate OF Scotland, who is a minister in Nicola Sturgeon’s government.

It was therefore the Scottish Government, alongside the one in Westminster, who were opposing the court even attempting to establish whether Scotland has the right to determine its own constitutional future.

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In a surprise development, we made Pete Wishart happy today.

And not just him.

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At a certain point you just have to laugh, even though it’s not really funny.

The submission being referred to is NOT the one Alex Salmond sent to the Holyrood committee this week, but the one he sent to the separate Hamilton inquiry almost a month ago, which had been cleared by his lawyers and was published in full by both Wings and The Spectator and read by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.

(For reasons we’re not allowed to tell you, the Wings version has been totally redacted and the Spectator’s has had one paragraph removed but is still mostly intact.)

Because the Fabiani inquiry won’t be publishing the document, that means Salmond isn’t allowed to discuss it when he gives oral evidence, and the inquiry isn’t permitted to consider any of its contents, just as with Geoff Aberdein’s submission.

(There’s very little Salmond actually WILL now be allowed to talk about if he appears before the committee. He might just about be able to confirm his name before the Lord Advocate has him arrested and charged with whatever the opposite of perjury is.)

In other words, the exact people who are supposed to be getting to the bottom of what happened are the only people in Scotland who have to pretend they haven’t read the evidence of the primary witness. (While also not being allowed to see the evidence of the other most important witness, or almost anything else.)

You really would struggle to make this stuff up, readers.

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We almost missed something today because it was hidden behind a bad headline.

One way or another, the current hell of Scottish politics will soon be at an end.

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Tonight somebody’s sent us a copy of the SNP’s official Social Media Policy, which is exactly the sort of awful corporate wonk-drivel you’d probably expect it to be.

Our favourite part was this masterpiece of unrememberable gibberish in the vein of the Scottish Government’s hopeless “FACTS” slogan (honestly, without going and looking can you remember what ANY of the letters represent?) for the coronavirus :

And here’s a tweet from earlier today from a prospective SNP candidate:

We’re not sure which of the letters that conforms to.

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