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.
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.
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.
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:
And here’s Cllr Joji setting an example last night:
Hmm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.
Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.
Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.
But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.
And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.
For many years now, whenever I’ve done one of those “Which Political Party Should You Be In?” online quiz things, it always says that I’m a Green, which is weird because I really hate cyclists. Nevertheless, it was still the result when I did one most recently, just last month.
So I decided that for the first time in my life it was finally time to join a political party.
Craig Murray’s speech to the Alba conference yesterday, delivered by his wife Nadira.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
