The grim thing is, the Daily Record’s headline isn’t even a lie.
You can check by listening to the interview yourself here, from 2h 10m.
“They don’t even live in Scotland!”
It really is quite uncanny how similar some SNP supporters have become to the most frothing, abusive blood-and-soil Yoons of 2014. But we can live with this company:
And let’s make something very clear.
We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.
By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.
He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.
(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)
So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.
And yet here we are.
Dr Malcolm Kerr joined the SNP in 1967, has contested local council and Scottish Parliament elections and is currently an activist in Cunninghame North constituency.
I’ve been a member of the SNP for long enough to recall the days when the party was capable of generating killer slogans. “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. “Independence – Nothing Less”. Those were the days!
Nothing describes the SNP’s descent towards being the new New Labour better than its choice of slogans in recent years. “Stronger for Scotland” serves only to flag up just how powerless the party’s large contingent at Westminster is. “Progress” is entirely meaningless.
And fellow activists and members may recall just how depressing it was to attend the most recent in-person spring Conference, when the leadership felt that the slogan “Hope” was going to be inspiring. When you’ve been in power for 14 years you’re supposed to DO things, not just hope for them.
We’re getting to the point where we should soon be Blairite enough to invade Iraq. Fortunately, we lack the means.
Yesterday we mentioned an SNP election leaflet that someone had posted on social media. It turns out that either deliberately or accidentally (probably the latter, while taking out the bit with their name and address on it) they’d cropped off part of it containing a logo that does passingly refer to independence. You can see it down at the bottom-right corner.
So we should note that by way of clarification. But what’s more interesting about the rest of the leaflet is that if you took the logos off it, it could be from literally ANY of the parties contesting the election. It contains no policies whatsoever, just some general feelgood sloganeering. Which parties, do you suppose, are campaigning AGAINST “equipping children to succeed” or “supporting businesses” or “creating jobs”?
The deeper truth is that the leaflet demonstrates how completely pointless this election actually is, because nothing you do with your vote next month is going to affect anything that happens in the subsequent five years. Only one party is going to win, and once they do it won’t matter what’s in the 76-page “manifesto” they released today. The manifesto is a fake – in reality it amounts to a single line: “keep us in power so we can fill our pockets and do whatever we like for another half a decade, suckers”.
Allow us to illustrate.
The latest group to come out in public defence of the ostensibly openly paedophiliac “Feminist Declaration” which was signed up to last year by a number of Scottish organisations is the “Rainbow Greens”.
The co-conveners of the Rainbow Greens are two men called Blair Anderson and Eilidh Martin. Let’s meet one of them, shall we?
While watching reports from the Alba Party women’s conference that took place this afternoon, we saw something that we thought must be wrong.
But it wasn’t.
If you still can’t see it, you’re probably never going to wake up.
But have a little think about those highlighted words this morning anyway.
It’s probably past time that we put this all in one post for easy reference.
Herald journalists with no idea what a story is, start here.
At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.
Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.
This is an utterly extraordinary tweet.
The three people who were asking to see the SNP’s books weren’t Sean Clerkin, they were MEMBERS OF THE SNP’S FINANCE & AUDIT COMMITTEE. That is, they were people whose actual literal job is to monitor the SNP’s finances, and who are all drawn from the membership of the SNP.
So what Hunter is saying there is that the SNP chose three of its own members to serve on its own finance committee, yet they could not be allowed to carry out their duties because their loyalties did not lie with the party.
In which case, a reasonable observer might very well ask, what sort of stupendously, farcically incompetent organisation puts such people in such positions?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
