Get ready for a lot of this in the coming days and weeks.
Obviously, don’t believe any of it.
Pretty soon now, nobody in a position of power will admit to ever having thought that transwomen were women. But don’t worry. We’ll remember.
As alert Wings readers will know, we’re fond of a WW2 analogy from time to time. The conflict is so extensively documented, and so deeply embedded in British culture (for both good and ill), that it’s a reliable tool for getting points across concisely and clearly.
(It’s also one of the last major wars in which, overall, the good guys and the bad guys were pretty indisputably easy to identify.)
So let’s keep that in mind for a moment while we look at this.
And then let’s talk about Stalingrad.
For 10 years in Germany between 1935 and 1945, Jewish people were not legally human. The Nuremberg Laws, drafted in large part by Wilhelm Stuckart, established the principle in law that Jews were to be denied any rights on the basis that they were untermensch, a German word literally meaning “subhuman”.
It would be, to say the least, highly controversial for anyone to put forward in 2025 the idea that Jewish people had actually ceased to be human beings during that period, even though the various laws had been passed by a legitimately-elected government in peacetime and attracted little in the way of international condemnation.
The truth is that regardless of what the law said, Jewish people remained humans for the whole time, which is why Nazi war criminals were tried after the war for “crimes against humanity”. The passing of a law had had absolutely no effect on their biological reality. (Other than that it led to millions of them being murdered, of course.)
But anyway. Nicola Sturgeon.
Is the above how she imagined her feminist legacy, do you think, readers?
Peter Murrell really ought to have seen the writing on the wall a while ago.
But at least it’s in keeping with her track record.
Y’know, maybe we were a little harsh on the lads at Holyrood Sources yesterday when we implied that a more direct and aggressive interviewing style might have cut through John Swinney and Kate Forbes’ pathetically feeble waffling evasion on the SNP’s lack of an independence strategy in their recent podcast.
But the closest thing (along with Colin Mackay at STV) that the Scottish media has left to a proper Rottweiler interviewer – Peter Adam Smith of ITV – had a shot at that five years ago and didn’t do any better.
Smith noted that even back in 2019 Nicola Sturgeon had been droning on about how Westminster’s refusal to grant a second indy referendum was “unsustainable” for two years already. But no matter how hard he pressed, Sturgeon just kept on glibly and smugly insisting that they’d concede.
“The UK government strategy is to say no. Do you have a way around it?”
“My strategy is to say yes.” [smirks]
Readers might be forgiven for wondering how long it’s going to take the SNP to accept that that “strategy” is a failure, if seven years and three First Ministers isn’t enough for them to have worked it out. But as long as the pathologically gullible keep voting for them anyway, we suppose they have no reason to.
This must be some kind of mistake.
Because we’re sure you’ve spent the last decade telling us that just couldn’t happen.
On 15 October 2012, I signed the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron to secure the independence referendum of September 2014.
On the same day Peter Kellner of the polling company YouGov wrote one of his condescending commentaries from London dissing any hope for the Yes campaign.
Kellner’s view was almost universal, and not just among the London pack of journos and politicians. Most, if not all, of the Scottish media agreed with him.
However, by September 2014 things looked very different.
Those of you on Twitter will probably be aware of this already, but for the rest:
It should be a bit of a lark, although the retrospective part will probably be rather more fun than the looking-forward part. I don’t get out much, so if you want to come along and throw some rotten fruit and/or say hi, tickets are here.
Exactly a decade ago today, on 11 August 2014, the Wee Blue Book was released.
This was where things stood at that moment in time.
One month after the WBB, that 20-point gap was down, like-for-like, to two points.
In the dying days of World War 2, as Berlin crumbled to rubble under Russian bombs and rockets, the Nazis played a desperate last card in the shape of the Volkssturm, an ad hoc fighting force primarily comprised of old men, invalided veterans and those not deemed fit for normal military service. (As most of those were already dead.)
They were rounded up and sent off to the front (usually only a few hundred yards away) in their civilian clothes, armed with whatever odds and sods of weaponry could be scrabbled together – most commonly the one-shot Panzerfaust anti-tank grenade, as seen in the pic above – and invariably slaughtered in the streets by the disbelieving battalions of the Red Army, because it didn’t matter to Hitler whether they lived or died.
And here we are again.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
