Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will have noticed some interesting stories recently.

The Scottish Sun’s scoop on Monday evening – a few hours after we tweeted information from a very well-informed source about the Crown Office’s continued attempts to obstruct Police Scotland’s investigation into the SNP’s finances – would have come as no great surprise to Wings readers already familiar with the way the unaccountable, unanswerable body operates.

But we’ve subsequently noticed a number of attempts by various people to muddy the story by talking about a “draft” warrant request, implying that there was no improper delay. So we checked up, and thought you might like to know how the process works.

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It’s not often we have to correct the figures of an esteemed KC like Joanna Cherry, but she’s made a straight-up mistake in her column for The National today.

Because of course Ash Regan and Kate Forbes did rather better than that.

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Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.

So let’s see the final scores on the doors.

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Tonight’s debate on Sky News between the three SNP leadership candidates was yet another inconclusive low-scoring draw, with each contender taking a few hits (almost all from host Beth Rigby) and also landing the odd blow on each other.

The most notable of the latter was probably when Ash Regan gave Humza Yousaf a rather uncomfortable time over his claiming credit for the Queensferry Crossing when he was Transport Secretary.

As well as frantically trying to deflect by pretending Regan had attacked the SNP’s record on the project in general, Yousaf insisted that he’d played a major role in the bridge’s delivery. So let’s just check the timeline.

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Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

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We’ve already noted how the Unionist press appears to be trying to influence the outcome of the SNP leadership election, but last night the big beast of Scottish media – the BBC – waded into the fray.

A major piece by the Corporation’s Scotland editor James Cook focused on interviews with two of the three contenders – excluding Ash Regan – on the basis that both had launched their official campaigns yesterday while Regan’s isn’t expected to be until later this week.

That’s fair enough. No problems there, right?

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There are terms beloved of politics activists and commonly used on social media which are a baffling mystery to the general public. We’ve spoken several times of the word “gaslighting”, which is understandably used as shorthand for quite a complex thing that’s difficult to describe concisely, but nevertheless acts as a barrier to understanding for anyone not overly political.

Today’s lesson is the term “DARVO”, and stars the Scottish Greens’ favourite rapist.

Let’s quickly see how it works.

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Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.

BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)

On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)

She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.

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Last night we couldn’t help chuckling at this.

Because as someone else on Twitter mocked, what’s actually laughable is the idea that criminals would never engage in any kind of deception in order to commit crimes, and that someone like Peter Tatchell would be so idiotic as to suggest such a thing.

But tonight it’s not even blackly comic.

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Our sinister network of shadowy agents informs us that the document below has just been sent by Murray Foote to all SNP Parliamentarians. (Click to enlarge.)

It would appear that the SNP is feeling some heat.

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The final result of our Twitter poll from yesterday was pretty conclusive.

(It was also by a distance the biggest response we can ever remember getting for one – normally our Twitter polls get around 3,000 votes.)

But of course Twitter polls aren’t scientific – they’re self-selecting and they draw from a biased sample, in this case people who follow Wings and are more likely to agree with us on most things. So we need a bit more data for a better picture.

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The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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