Wings Over Scotland

…simply don’t ask the question.

And the problem will magically go away.

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…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.

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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?”

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Someone forwarded a Freedom Of Information response to us today. It’s frighteningly illustrative of the kind of Scotland that the SNP are bringing into being.

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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.

When we suggested yesterday that the SNP was turning into New Labour, we didn’t expect them to go to quite so much trouble to provide us with a timely illustration.

In happier times, almost seven years ago, a united and focused Yes movement had a bit of fun at the expense of Labour MP Ian Murray when he had a huge pearl-clutching fainting fit over someone putting a couple of stickers on his constituency office.

Record-scratch and jump-cut to the 2021 SNP.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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This tweet sums it up pretty well.

“I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s still worth celebrating.”

God help us all.

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We’re only two-thirds of the way through Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence to the Fabiani inquiry, and there’s probably not much point in expressing our opinion on it because you could almost certainly have guessed what it was going to be. The First Minister has been disingenuous, evasive, defensive and at times outright dishonest.

But although we were expecting all of that, this truly shocked us:

That’s the First Minister flatly stating, under oath, that even now she doesn’t know who all the complainers are. And readers can make their own minds up about how credible a claim that is. But I can tell you this:

I know who they all are.

Craig Murray knows who they all are.

Every journalist who covered the trial knows who they all are.

(And we can reasonably assume their editors also know who they all are.)

In fact pretty much everyone who’s in any way connected to Scottish politics knows the identity of every single one of these women. If you’re willing to believe that we all do but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t, well, fair enough. But also, I’m a Nigerian prince and I’d like to pass several million pounds through your bank account. Please get in touch.