Wings Over Scotland

The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.

“What you’re saying is a man can try to kiss a woman, or he can say completely inappropriate things to her, when he’s 30 years older than her and he’s the First Minister of Scotland.

I’m worried about what this says more widely to other women, or just to us as a society. I mean, where does this leave us?”

Now, since the court found that neither of those things actually happened, the logical answer in that person’s case ought surely to be “facing prosecution for perjury”. But readers will be astonished to learn that that isn’t where the show went.

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If you didn’t already know that the BBC were going to run a character-assassination hatchet job on Alex Salmond tonight (and another one tomorrow), you could surmise it easily enough from the state of the Scottish media in the last few days.

We’ve almost lost count of the attack pieces on the former First Minister in the run-up to the show, from specially-commissioned opinion polls to conveniently-timed releases of allegations of unspecified “bullying” during his leadership and highly selective leaks from the documentary itself.

But it’s today’s Daily Record that dredges the depths of the journalistic sewer with a barrel and then scrapes the very bottom of it for the grubbiest, oiliest sludge it can find.

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Our regular weekend comedian Chris Cairns is off on a golf holiday this weekend (in fairness he’s only had four so far this year and it’s already August), but this is a sicker joke than anything he’s ever come up with.

We haven’t covered Martin Keating’s court case because we have some unanswered concerns about its transparency and communication, but it’s doing just fine without us, having passed £100,000 of its £155,000 funding target earlier today.

It’s bad enough that some random activist is having to do this and pay for it when the Scottish Government – who SHOULD have been doing it three years ago – sits with its thumb up its hole staring out of the window, but having their representatives actively attack and try to sabotage it is disgusting to a degree we can barely find words for.

We’ve had our fair share of doubts about stuff of late, but if Scottish independence achieved nothing more than putting a useless wage-stealing tosser like Pete Wishart out of a cushy Westminster job-for-life, it’d be worth doing for that alone.

It is our grave and solemn duty to inform readers that there’s been another entrant in the New Act Of Union Of The Year competition. (This is an extremely niche joke.)

The details of this one, which is arguably even more bonkers than the last one, needn’t concern us here. But they’re a reminder of something we DO need to remember.

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Ah, so NOW we know why the SNP’s woke junior league stitched up the NEC to stop serious, talented and experienced politicians like Joanna Cherry and Philippa Whitford standing as MSPs in next year’s Holyrood election.

Who could ever have guessed, etc?

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Labour sub-faction the Scottish Fabians this weekend published a call for “a new Act Of Union”, an idea that’s been kicking around in the party for some time since failed branch office manager Kezia Dugdale came up with it in 2016.

And at first it sounds almost intelligent and democratic, proposing a clearly defined path by which any of the four constituent nations of the UK could become independent.

But then you get to the small print.

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It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.

Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.

To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.

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Symbolism matters in politics. What ostensibly can appear minor actions can have significant effect. Simply changing the names of things, whether from Londonderry to Derry or from the Scottish Executive to the Scottish Government (and swapping a UK-focused logo for a Scotland-focused one), were hugely important, signalling a new era and enthusing supporters.

Similarly, it’s been the case that as well as public actions of political leaders there requires to be mobilisation of grassroots supporters.

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So we guess this is an answer to our question:

But there are many more questions.

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SNP MSP James Dornan is someone Wings always had a lot of time for, at least until his shameful and central role in the stitch-up of Mark McDonald – an act which was the foundation stone for all of the party’s subsequent chicanery. We can only speculate as to his motivations for doing so, and their connection or otherwise to a certain deranged and ambitious fantasist in his close circle.

But as anyone who’s watched The Usual Suspects (or GoodFellas, or pretty much any classic-era Bond movie) will tell you, the real villains have a nasty habit, once they’ve achieved their goals, of “tidying up” anyone who might link them to their misdeeds – especially if those people don’t fit the ideal of their brave new worlds.

So an old, straight, white, working-class male like James Dornan, who signed the SNP Women’s Pledge, was always likely to find himself propping up a motorway flyover at some point sooner or later, and thus it has proved.

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