Wings Over Scotland

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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Okay, folks, time to put our hands up and admit it: we got this one wrong.

We thought they’d be subtle.

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A few months ago, we all had a good chuckle at Pete Wishart’s screeching 180-degree turn on the subject of using a plebiscitary election for independence, a strategy which switched overnight from “suicidal, disastrous fringe lunacy with no hope of success” to “genius plan Nicola herself came up with”.

But after that crude ad-hoc field patch, we’re delighted to be able to report that Pete has submitted himself to SNP HQ for a full operating system update and is now fully compliant with the New Truth.

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The response to our post of last night has been astonishing.

(Although we’re not sure how “new followers” is being calculated there. We actually have more than 500 extra followers since 8pm – we can only assume that it’s only counting those who right-clicked and followed from that specific tweet.)

And part of the reason is that it’s plain that almost nobody knew about the report, even though it came out three months ago (when Wings was still in retirement). We had to dig deep to find any media coverage of it at all, and what there was was cursory at best, and sometimes a lot worse.

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It was already quite bold/crass to equate “letting rapists change their legal sex so their victim has to refer to them as ‘she’ in court” with the life’s work of Nelson Mandela.

But the punchline was still a chef’s kiss to treasure.

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This is a quite extraordinary thing for a grown adult to say.

When a reader quoted it in a comment earlier today we were reluctant to believe it. Googling the words produced only a broken Facebook link and a Scottish Daily Express story (and the Wings reader’s comment), which obviously did little to disperse the scepticism.

Facebook is essentially unsearchable (which in itself is a pretty good reason not to trust anyone who does the majority of their work on it), and even when we went to the Believe In Scotland page and scrolled down and down and down and down for an eternity, it was impossible to find.

But eventually we had a brainwave and searched the site’s pictures for the one used in the Express and found the post. He really said it. And it needs some examination.

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The SNP is now almost entirely incapable of telling the truth.

Let’s just check the above by way of example.

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The SNP have been all over the place since Wednesday’s judgement of the Supreme Court. Astonishingly, the party hadn’t prepared an agreed line in the event of the Court ruling against it, with the result that various party figures had popped up with all sorts of different versions of what a supposed plebiscite election would mean.

The closest things to an “official” position were when the SNP’s Policy Development Convener Toni Giugliano, and former Glasgow city councillor and Nicola Sturgeon’s mouthpiece Mhairi Hunter (who’d dismissed the whole idea of a plebiscite election as “impossible” earlier this year), both suggested that a victory in a plebiscite general election would simply amount to another mandate to demand a Section 30 order.

The party’s Depute Leader Keith Brown, on the other hand, had claimed that winning such an election would produce independence by itself. But lest any Yes supporters get over-excited, on TV this afternoon Brown declared that the matter would have to wait at least a couple of years.

Why? Because apparently the SNP can’t be bothered with the paperwork.

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