Wings Over Scotland

Voting is now open in the selection contests to determine who the SNP’s candidates at next year’s election will be. Given the extremely dodgy secret-Survey-Monkey-ballot shenanigans recently adopted by the party NEC, we’re uncomfortably reminded of a famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”.

An excellent blog by the former SNP Trade & Industry spokesman Iain Lawson today highlights the near-impossibility of effecting change from within the SNP now, due to changes made by the leadership to eliminate the influence of ordinary members.

Indeed, so secure do the party’s controlling faction consider themselves that they now feel able to openly call their own supporters “bitches”.

But not quite SO secure that they still don’t want to cheat.

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On Sunday we told you about Mridul Wadhwa, a man who deceived his way into a job at a rape crisis centre and now wants to be an SNP MSP, in a seat where the party supposedly has an all-woman shortlist. The story was picked up today by the Times.

But Wadhwa isn’t the only man trying to muscle in on a woman-only shortlist.

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We’re not wholly convinced by prospective SNP candidate Toni Giugliano’s credentials as an impartial voice on the trans-vs-women’s-rights issue, given that he previously referred to Joan McAlpine as a “bigot”. But the statement below – it’s good to speak to people on both sides of a debate – is surely the very definition of sense and reason.

(The person in question, incidentally, is Caroline McAllister, who the SNP NEC blocked from contesting the Dumbarton seat Giugliano wants to stand for.)

Yet that simple and wildly uncontroversial position – that the view shared by the vast majority of the population should at the minimum be heard and considered – caused a predictable storm of fury from the SNP’s woke faction, who directly equated a belief in biology and women’s rights with bigotry, racism and Nazism.

We attach a representative selection below. Can any alert readers spot the common link between all these people who are beside themselves with outrage that the subject of women’s rights should even be discussed or debated?

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Television’s transforming before our eyes, as both what we watch and how we watch it changes. An ever-greater number of programmes shown through increasing mediums. But that doesn’t equate to balanced political coverage being provided, quality product displayed, or distinct countries reflected.

The United States, despite the great wealth and talent available to it in Hollywood and elsewhere, is the worse for the absence of a properly funded and high quality public broadcasting service. Its society is the poorer and its democracy badly distorted by its absence. It’s why Scotland needs a properly funded public broadcaster.

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If there’s still anyone left reading this site who doubts that the SNP National Executive Committee is currently engaged in a coup against the membership of the party, meant to be a fait accompli by the time the NEC is up for re-election at the end of November, we’d urge you to read the extremely disturbing letter below from the Convener of the party’s Constituency Association (CA) in Dumbarton, which he’s attempting to circulate to local members against obstruction from the NEC (pictured), who have shut down the branch mailer system from party HQ to stop the CA speaking to its members.

(We first saw it on Iain Lawson’s excellent blog, and are carrying out the request for it to be as widely distributed as possible.)

It’s long, so we’ve highlighted a couple of passages of particular interest.

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Holiday Boy is off for the next fortnight, readers, but there’s no way he’d have come up with anything funnier than this anyway.

We’re not sure he’s got the name right. But we’ll add that one to the list.

We’ve had another Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government.

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The most tedious question we ever get asked when we criticise the SNP – because we’ve explained it a hundred times already and none of the people asking have ever bothered to look – is “But what would YOU do to secure independence, clever-clogs?”

We’ve outlined that plan in detail repeatedly – you can read it again here if you want. But maybe we need something a bit simpler for the hard of thinking, so let’s have a go.

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We just noticed a finding from the most recent opinion poll that surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of every Scottish newspaper except the Press & Journal.

As far as we can ascertain, the P&J was alone in reporting the obviously newsworthy fact that just a quarter of Scots believe the First Minister’s ridiculous cock-and-bull story about “forgetting” the occasion when she first heard that her friend, colleague and mentor of 30 years was facing charges of trying to rape some of her other friends.

But the figures are part of a wider and depressing trend.

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When even someone as catastrophically vacant as Alex Cole-Hamilton thinks he’s got your number, it’s probably time to accept that the game’s up.

But that’s the unenviable position the First Minister finds herself in today.

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It doesn’t take a master analyst to see that the Salmond inquiry committee is running out of patience with the Scottish Government’s endless attempts to obstruct its work.

This afternoon it issued a statement, with obvious irritation, making clear that it did not wish to see documents the Scottish Government was trying to submit to it, which the committee had not asked for, and which had previously been struck down as unlawful by Lord Pentland in the initial judicial inquiry.

The Scottish Government’s only purpose in doing so was to try to put the details of the discredited and disproven-in-court allegations into the public domain with the intention of smearing Mr Salmond yet again, and the committee has made its displeasure with the plan clear, telling the Scottish Government to abandon its intended legal action to release the documents and get on with producing the ones the inquiry HAS asked for.

But there’s a little bit more to the story than that.

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We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.

It was quite the performance.

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