Wings Over Scotland

Last week Nicola Sturgeon’s government introduced the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRRB) at stage one. Cabinet Secretary Shona Robison’s introductory speech sounded reasonable and fair, but those words do not match the deeds of the SNP leadership and they do not reflect reality.

The behaviour of the SNP leadership towards anyone with even the most benign question about this legislation has been aggressive, dismissive, and openly hostile.

Read the rest of this entry →

In the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the Scottish Greens received just 4.7% of all the votes cast. (255,314 of 5,419,544). The SNP got 44% – almost 10 times as many.

So we’re not sure how the Greens – a party that well over 90% of Scots don’t support – suddenly appear to be in charge.

Nor, perhaps more to the point, do we understand why.

Read the rest of this entry →

Do you remember, readers, how the next UK election was supposed to be a single-issue de facto referendum on independence if the Supreme Court ruled Holyrood didn’t have the power to hold one itself?

Well, it appears that policy has been abruptly and quietly ditched.

Because just a couple of hours ago SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford told BBC News that “I can assure you” the SNP “will have a growth manifesto” for the whole UK whenever the next election comes around, because in his view the UK economy hasn’t been growing enough for the last few decades and the SNP would have a plan to fix it. Because apparently fixing the UK is the SNP’s purpose now.

Guess we better hope for a good result from the Supreme Court, then.

Read the rest of this entry →

This probably merits more attention.

Because the SNP are now openly, publicly telling you that they’re never going to achieve independence for Scotland, nor even make any meaningful attempt at it.

Read the rest of this entry →

The SNP have just revealed the agenda for their conference next month. As expected, and hilariously, it includes a proposal for a “code of conduct” as proposed by the Twitler Youth sturmjugend of the Aberdeen Independence Movement.

We can only salute their timing.

Read the rest of this entry →

On the 8th anniversary of the indyref, and 16 months after closing down (although in fact we’ve averaged one post a week since then), Wings Over Scotland is once again getting more traffic than the next five biggest indy sites put together.

This isn’t a good thing.

Read the rest of this entry →

So this just happened.

Which even in the hopelessly politically-debased world of the modern Scottish judiciary might be one of the most extraordinary miscarriages of justice in the nation’s history.

Read the rest of this entry →

Readers, meet SNP councillor Fatima Joji.

As you can see, she’s part of the hyperwoke “Aberdeen Independence Movement” faction which recently took it upon itself to issue a “code of conduct” for independence campaigners, demanding that everyone in the Yes movement should debate things:

“politely and positively at all times, without rancour and bitterness […] in a respectful and tolerant manner, agreeing to differ where necessary but always ­taking a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination and prejudice.”

And here’s Cllr Joji setting an example last night:

Hmm.

Read the rest of this entry →

By now Wings readers will likely have already seen today’s events in the House Of Commons, where Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle completely lost his rag at Alba MPs (and Wings contributors) Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey for protesting against the UK government’s refusal to respect Scotland’s mandate for an independence referendum.

‘Get them out’ demand Tory benches as Speaker Lindsay Hoyle orders ALBA MPs Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill out of the chamber for heckling Boris Johnson. #pmqs pic.twitter.com/RiADdSwKZA

— Phantom Power (@PhantomPower14) July 13, 2022

Every one of the SNP’s MPs, meanwhile, sat meekly on their hands and didn’t squeak a single word of protest even as the Speaker flagrantly disregarded the House’s rules and subsequently improperly suspended the two Alba members for a week.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re still retired, but this just can’t go unremarked.

This is absolute banana-republic stuff. Even before you get into any of the specifics of the case, it’s simply not the Crown Office’s job to interfere with a police investigation by telling them who they may and may not interview under caution.

Scottish justice is extremely seriously compromised.

Read the rest of this entry →

15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.

The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.

So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.

I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.

My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.

Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.

Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.