Wings Over Scotland

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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Let’s get straight to the point: this is a straight-up categorical lie.

Since Wednesday’s events there’s been a lot of chatter and confusion on social media about whether the Scottish Government has the ability to trigger a snap Holyrood election and use it as a de facto plebiscite on independence.

The short answer, as we told you yesterday, is “officially no, in practice yes”. But that needs a bit of further explanation, so as usual let’s do the job of actual journalism that nobody else in Scotland can apparently be bothered to.

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As a rule I try not to respond to the literally dozens of deranged attacks on this site that are posted by James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, but I really dislike being called a liar so I’m going to take a moment for this one.

James appears to have taken extraordinary offence to a two-paragraph stats post I put up to mark Wings’ 11th birthday this week, and has written two purple-faced rants about it. So for the record’s sake I’m going to comply with his demand as best I can.

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The National has an “EXCLUSIVE” story today.

We think you’re meant to be outraged.

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Honestly, readers, swear to God, all joking and sarcasm aside, when we saw this tweet yesterday we were wondering how on Earth some clever satirist had managed to hack Anas Sarwar’s account to insert the screenshot into it.

Because we didn’t believe that even Scottish Labour’s low-watt-bulb of a branch manager would willingly post something that made him look so much of an imbecile.

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First of all, congratulations to the Herald for only being eight days behind a retired website on this story. Unusually fast work, lads.

Now let’s deal with the spin.

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A few days have now passed since Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement of the supposed routemap to an independence referendum, and we’ve had time to analyse it properly.

You’re not going to like it much.

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Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.

The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.

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This is getting properly embarrassing.

Because that starting gun must be red-hot by now.

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As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.

In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.

The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.

If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.

Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.

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