Wings Over Scotland

So there it is. In a massive, humiliating and abrupt reverse, the Scottish Greens have announced that they’ll support the Scottish Government – still led for the foreseeable future by Humza Yousaf – in this week’s confidence motion.

Shockingly enough, the debate about the Greens’ principles, intellectual consistency and integrity was an extremely brief one. Faced with the loss of their relevance and influence, they crumbled like month-old carrot cake and rushed their cards onto the table before the SNP had time to do any thinking.

Any hope Kate Forbes might have had of leading the SNP just evaporated, and so did any hope of grown-up government between now and 2026. The SNP will now spend the next two years as pathetic, grovelling puppets, doing whatever the Greens want as long as the paycheques and pension contributions keep rolling in.

It’s a tragic demise for a party that just a couple of years ago still crushed all before it in Scottish politics. But that’s showbiz, folks.

We apologise for making you look at Ross Greer’s face on a weekend.

But what he said to the Holyrood Sources podcast yesterday is important.

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It’s probably as good an illustration of the madness currently engulfing Scottish politics as anything that the most unusual suspect, Anas Sarwar, may have just – temporarily at least – saved Humza Yousaf’s job.

And although our head hurts already, we’ll try to explain why.

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At FMQs today, Douglas Ross announced that he was putting down a motion of no confidence in the Scottish Government in the wake of the collapse of the Bute House agreement. That creates an enormously interesting situation, because the arithmetic of Parliament is extremely finely balanced, and particularly in the light of Patrick Harvie’s subsequent contribution.

In short, what it means is that the future of the government hangs on Ash Regan.

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We tweeted this last night as a teaser for our big exclusive. (Which is now hilariously being claimed by Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record seven hours later.)

And it does now seem to be the case that the news is that the SNP are ending the Bute House Agreement and kicking out the Greens before the Greens do it first.

And what that tells us, for a starter, is that the SNP’s once-legendary skill in news management really is now well and truly on fire, as in “bin”.

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While we all wait for the thing we all really want to happen this week, try to pretend that the disastrous and pitiful “indy march and rally” at the weekend never took place, and do our best to ignore the fact that thanks to the weakness of Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf our country’s government is infested with lunatic extremist child-abuse apologists, let’s see if we can’t take some time out from all the doom and gloom to offer something constructive.

Not you, Patrick. This is for grown-ups, you can sit it out on your wee high chair.

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There are, at the most generous possible maximum estimate, maybe 1600 people here, including the wee knot of 100 or so Unionists circled at bottom left.

That is now the size of the self-styled “mainstream independence movement”.

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The pause button has been released. The day is finally here.

And it’s one that EVERY supporter of independence should rejoice in.

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Correct us if we’re wrong, but isn’t this guy:

…the same man who LITERALLY just passed a law dividing Scotland into groups of people who are worthy of protection from hatred and those who aren’t? (Most notably women and people who know what sex they are.)

Is he, then, a “bad faith actor”? Maybe we misunderstood.

Now, before we start this piece we should probably note that we don’t think anyone’s losing anything by being excluded from Believe In Scotland’s latest money-gathering exercise (folding, please, not clinking!) in Glasgow later this month. We rather suspect most folk can manage fine without spending a Saturday afternoon listening to tedious speeches from Pat Kane, Ross Greer and Iona Fyfe.

But this is still disturbing:

Because for a party which pretty much never mentions Scottish independence, which conspicuously removed the word “INDEPENDENCE” from their conference banner last week, and which stated just days ago that independence wouldn’t be any sort of red line preventing them doing a coalition deal with Scottish Labour, to be able to effectively veto the participation of ACTUAL independence parties from (ostensibly) independence rallies is a strange state of affairs indeed.

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