Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been meaning to talk about this for a few days, but other stuff kept coming up.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

Alert readers won’t have failed to notice a steady drip of stories being fed to the media in recent weeks from SNP figures talking down the idea of the next general election as a de facto referendum.

Many in the party, such as new Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, are clearly very uncomfortable about having been pushed into doing, well, pretty much anything to actually try to achieve independence, even if it’s still two years away, because having (in most cases only recently) acquired themselves some lovely lucrative Westminster careers and pensions they’re not keen on suddenly risking losing them.

But the column above is an illuminating one.

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A few months ago, we all had a good chuckle at Pete Wishart’s screeching 180-degree turn on the subject of using a plebiscitary election for independence, a strategy which switched overnight from “suicidal, disastrous fringe lunacy with no hope of success” to “genius plan Nicola herself came up with”.

But after that crude ad-hoc field patch, we’re delighted to be able to report that Pete has submitted himself to SNP HQ for a full operating system update and is now fully compliant with the New Truth.

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Alert readers of Wings will know that I have a fondness for sweet and fruity things, and a particular favourite of mine are Tropical Vibes still lemonades. (NB Other drinks are available, this site is in no way sponsored by or financially affiliated to Tropical Vibes.)

I especially like their Ocean Blue variety, a deliciously sharp and tangy refresher which contains real blueberry juice.

Just not very MUCH real blueberry juice.

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As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.

At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.

Today is the second kind of day.

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Things change very slowly, then very suddenly. Here’s to better days, readers.

Past and future.

I’ll be honest, readers, I’m so exhausted from despising the sickening nonce-panderers of the SNP this week that I can’t summon the energy to write any more about them. So I’m going to hand over to some other people.

All pics are links so that you can read full threads, see context and access any linked articles, and all these people are worth following.

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Last night this happened.

The events marked simply and unquestionably the most shameful and contemptible moment in the history of the Scottish Parliament since 1707.

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The National must have been enormously proud when it successfully fought off all the other newspapers to secure this stunning exclusive today.

We must admit, when we had a good look in the “Pete Wishart Victories” section of our extensive archives we drew a blank. So we were excited to read on and find out.

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Let’s be quite clear what this means.

It means that the new Westminster leader of the SNP thinks it’s “absurd” to even try to achieve independence while the UK is in a crisis.

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The SNP has for quite some time been a hollow shell of a political party. Like the Conservative Party, its members have been systematically stripped of all policy-making powers, with decisions of conference on major issues simply ignored and other policies pushed through (most notably “gender reform”) which have never been put in front of conference for debate at all.

The party is now primarily a vehicle for processing cash and funnelling it to carefully selected and ideologically vetted activists, mostly from the fundamentalist youth wing, who are given well-paid jobs working for MPs and MSPs or parachuted into council seats in return for their unquestioning loyalty to Nicola Sturgeon.

And at this, it must be admitted, the SNP is still a highly effective operation. Which is fortunate, because without UK government money it would be bankrupt.

Above are the Electoral Commission’s donation figures for the third quarter of 2022. They note that 100% of the SNP’s reportable income for that period came from the UK government’s coffers – a trait shared with Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the DUP.

Given that three of those four parties are nationalists committed to removing various constituent parts of the UK, one might almost be tempted to commend Westminster’s generosity. But perhaps it knows exactly what it’s doing.

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Can this really be six and a half years ago?

We suddenly feel very old.

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Word reaches us, readers, that Nicola Sturgeon was “furious” when she joined the most recent meeting of the SNP’s Westminster group by Skype. Her rage was driven by the suggestion that the party should trigger a Holyrood election to act as a de facto independence referendum, a policy we’re reliably told is supported by a number of MPs who are too scared of being browbeaten by Sturgeon in front of their colleagues to actually speak out in favour of it.

(We won’t mention their names at this point.)

Our source mentioned to us that they seemed to remember an interview in which the First Minister had revealed a possible reason for her extreme antipathy to the idea – one for the BBC’s extensive and rather good three-part documentary “Yes/No – Inside The Indyref”, which was broadcast in August 2019 and never seen again.

It’s not available on iPlayer or YouTube, but fortunately we happened to still have the show recorded on our Sky+ box, so we went to check, and lo and behold our source’s recollection was correct. Apologies for the slightly wonky quality of this video, as we had to record it off the TV screen.

We’ve transcribed it below.

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