Wings Over Scotland

The newest Panelbase poll, which shows a narrow lead for independence, was an “omnibus” one with questions provided by multiple clients, including Wings and the Sunday Times. The questions we’re about to show you were asked by the ST rather than ourselves, but their results are deeply disturbing on multiple levels.

The first one is perhaps predictable but still unsettling. (Click all pics to enlarge.)

A huge 2:1 majority of Scots believe the Scottish Government’s proposed new “gender recognition” laws pose a safety risk to women. Tory voters think so by almost 9:1, Lib Dem voters by almost 6:1, and Labour voters by nearly 2:1.

That can only partly be explained away by partisan party loyalty – Labour and the Liberal Democrats both support the bill, but their own voters are still strongly against. More noteworthy is the fact that (excluding Don’t Knows) even slavishly loyal SNP voters agree with the statement by a smaller but still clear 12-point margin, 56 to 44.

So let’s say it unambiguously: most SNP voters think the SNP’s gender reforms pose a danger to women’s safety.

But that’s not the disturbing bit.

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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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To its eternal disgrace, the University Of Edinburgh is trying to prevent this excellent film from being shown in Scotland, as part of a systematic campaign of suppression and censorship that starts from the highest offices of the Scottish Government and works its way down through academia, the arts and the civic sector.

It deserves to be seen and supported.

There has of course been a lot of chat since last night about the latest Ipsos Mori poll putting independence on 56%, with the usual suspects getting over-excited.

It remains to be seen whether the figures represent a short blip of anger over the Supreme Court decision, a more sustained but still temporary period of Yes support like that of summer 2020 – spring 2021, or a permanent shift in public opinion.

So as such they’re actually relatively uninteresting, although the SNP’s plan to do absolutely nothing to take advantage of any momentum that might exist, and to wait several months before even having a strategy conference, remains disturbing.

But what actually caught our eye about the poll were a couple of questions nobody else has reported on.

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It’s more than two years now since we published this article, but it’s worth quickly going over it again, because there’s nothing on Earth more tedious than boneheads on social media going “Oh, you slag off the SNP but what’s YOUR plan if you’re so clever?”, who haven’t bothered to read any of the dozen times we’ve already answered that question since 25 months ago.

This is it. This is our plan. Try listening this time, thickos.

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Yesterday we watched the first day’s proceedings of For Women Scotland taking the Scottish Government to court over its definition of what a woman is.

The topic is really very niche but will affect us all if the judge rules for the government (we won’t know the outcome for at least a month or two), so here’s the short version of what it’s all about.

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Someone had to remind us that today is Wings Over Scotland’s 11th birthday.

In a grim indictment of Scotland’s once-vaunted political new media, a site that’s been officially closed since May 2021 is still far and away the most-read in the country, despite that readership now being mostly angry overgrown children squabbling with each other in the comments. People would apparently still, by a vast margin, rather read that than endure the tedium of Bella Caledonia or Believe In Scotland.

We’ve said pretty much all that there is to be said about that miserable state of affairs already, so we won’t repeat ourselves. God help the independence movement.

In the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the Scottish Greens received just 4.7% of all the votes cast. (255,314 of 5,419,544). The SNP got 44% – almost 10 times as many.

So we’re not sure how the Greens – a party that well over 90% of Scots don’t support – suddenly appear to be in charge.

Nor, perhaps more to the point, do we understand why.

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Kezia Dugdale, the hapless leader who took Scottish Labour to 14% in the polls, is one of the most extravagantly-paid people in Scotland who has no discernible talent or significance to public life whatsoever.

As well as being the Director of the John Smith Policy Centre (a job with no known responsibilities but which nevertheless pays around the same as being an MSP making laws in the Scottish Parliament) she writes regular columns in The Times and The Courier and is now, hilariously, the new Professor of Practice in Public Service in Glasgow University.

(A post with unspecified duties and unknown salary and which was also not, as far as anyone can tell, ever publicly advertised.)

We were bored so we thought we’d find out, via Panelbase, if her latest lucrative role was perhaps the result of a noticeably impressive performance in the first one.

Ah. Not so much.

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Sometimes even fools and liars and charlatans speak the truth.

Thing is, we rather liked it when the horses south of the border were frightened. Things happened in those days. But to coin a phrase, those days are past now.

This probably merits more attention.

Because the SNP are now openly, publicly telling you that they’re never going to achieve independence for Scotland, nor even make any meaningful attempt at it.

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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.

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