Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you back once again to the only event in politics that’s more frequent than a Scottish Labour leadership election.
Seems to come round sooner every year, doesn’t it?
…appear to be about to roll over Leslie Evans.
Which in itself raises some extremely serious questions about the judgement of the First Minister who extended Evans’ contract by two years in January 2020, long after she’d known about the series of disastrous and costly blunders Evans had made in the Salmond investigation.
But that’s not even the real story.
Writing about the Hate Crime Bill in the Herald today, Kevin McKenna summarises in a sentence a point this website has been making for many months.
Because the real question about the SNP’s sudden demented obsession with focusing the public’s attention on its most unpopular policies right before supposedly the most important election in its history isn’t “Why?”
It’s “Why now?”
Last week we warned you to beware of poll questions containing the formulation “Does [X] make you more or less likely to vote in a certain way?”, and this evening Survation have provided us with an example of why.
According to those numbers, the conflict between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon has caused a staggering 47% of Scots to change their likelihood of voting Yes in an independence referendum. And the bulk of those – 37% – say it’s made them MUCH more or MUCH less likely to vote Yes.
Those numbers break by more than 2 to 1 (23% to 11%) in favour of “much less likely”, which is a margin of change (12 points) bigger than almost any Yes majority that’s ever been recorded in a poll.
In other words, if the poll is to be believed, Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to neutralise Alex Salmond as a threat to her personal political power has almost definitely turned a Yes vote into a No vote as people have started paying attention to it.
We’re assuming, naturally, that the First Minister will be duly suspended from the SNP while these shocking allegations are fully investigated, just like Gareth Wardell, Denise Findlay, Neale Hanvey, Mark McDonald, Michelle Thomson, Neil Hay, etc etc etc were.
We’re not, of course. And nor should she be, because “shared a platform with” is the ugly ginger stepchild of fake-outrage cancel culture – lower on the smear scale even than “liked a tweet by” or “linked an article by someone who completely separately had an unfashionable opinion on a completely different subject several years ago”. It’s absolute guff punted only by scumbags.
Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact is that those are precisely the crimes for which other people WERE suspended and/or ostracised from the party, and we can’t help wishing the SNP’s flagrant hypocrisy about it was just a little bit less obvious and less arrogantly blatant, so that it wasn’t quite so painfully offensive to any decent person, and so that we weren’t having to fight quite so hard to keep believing in independence when we see the grim state of the Scotland that’s taking shape before our eyes.
But hey, we are where we are.
We’re sure most alert readers will by now have seen the purported “leak” of the actual results of the SNP’s mystery-shrouded regional list selections. While the figures are highly believable, we haven’t yet been able to obtain any corroboration for them being anything other than a plausible hoax.
The SNP has of course denied them, but they also denied our recent leak from the party’s draft manifesto and we know for sure that that was real. The trouble with lying all the time is that nobody believes you even if you occasionally tell the the truth.
Of course, there would be an easy way to prove the numbers were a fake – release the real ones, which is in any case the most fundamental element of transparency in a democratic election. And whatever they are could hardly be any more embarrassing than the rumours, which have candidates topping the list (and likely to get seats) on a shocking 2.4% of the vote.
Heavens, even Annie Wells managed 8.6%.
But there’s a much more important reason the SNP will never release the real results.
An extraordinary find by alert reader Ian Brotherhood in the archives.
(Click to enlarge.)
The paragraph at top right is a particular eye-catcher.
It brings us genuinely no pleasure at all to report that events in Scottish politics are panning out exactly the way we’ve been telling you they would for nearly two years.
Because this is the worst of all possible worlds.
There’s a strange new affliction affecting the SNP: fear of figures.
Now, we should say that we don’t believe for even a second that the SNP has actually had 10,000 new members in the last two days. It’s ridiculous to the point of insulting. But purely for the sake of argument, let’s imagine it was true.
Why would you say it like that?
Finally, after an astonishing four and a half days of “counting”, the SNP have released their candidate rankings for the regional list in this year’s Holyrood election. We’ll give you the results first, and then something much more interesting.
NO SKIPPING STRAIGHT TO THE END, THOUGH.
Like an old man getting up for the fourth time in the middle of the night, the Scottish Government has squeezed out another little dribble of its legal advice in respect of the conduct of its shambolic investigation into false allegations against Alex Salmond.
And to push that gross analogy to its outermost limit, it must have found releasing one of the documents in particular as painful as passing a rather large kidney stone.
What puzzles many about the Alex Salmond situation is motive. It’s incredibly difficult for some Yes supporters to imagine any motive that could justify the awfulness of what Alex Salmond has been put through by his successor, and so they reject the whole idea of any sinister goings-on out of hand.
However, it’s far easier to understand what went on when you look at the personality of Nicola Sturgeon and her historical pattern of behaviour.
Because the core fact is that Sturgeon simply cannot bear to lose. She’s very single-minded, and doesn’t really adapt or regroup in the face of adversity. When events and new information make problems for her ideas and plans, she just keeps going – often creating more problems as she tries to force the plan back on track.
Sturgeon’s main priority – in common with most politicians – is to stay in power and to boost her own image and profile. We can look at some hot topics and her behaviour around them, and gain clear insights into what happened to Alex Salmond and why.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
