Once again, we’re dismayed to report that we called it right. Because last night SNP MSP Mairi McAllan, officially representing the party on Question Time, told a weary audience in Fort William that that was precisely the case.
And readers, if ever a policy has been tested in battle and found wanting, it’s that one.
Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.
The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.
It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.
For what these are about, see here. This one’s from 23 August 2019.
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I’m going to talk about this story for a bit, and I’m sorry because I’m as sick of this subject as everyone else is but it’s really really important. Tune out for 10 minutes if you must.
I’ve never been a person who suffered from blackouts. In my younger days I would frequently drink Olympian amounts of booze and pass out in a heap (and/or pool of my own vomit) under a table, but when I woke up I always remembered how I got there. I also went under general anaesthetic a couple of times at the dentist when I was wee, and always remembered counting down from 10 with the mask on before I woke up. (“10…9…8…zzzzzzzz”)
In my entire half-century on this planet, there’s only one gap in my memory. (Like, I don’t remember what I had for dinner on 8 July 1987, but you know what I mean. I remembered it the next day, just not any more.)
It happened when I was about 14, playing rugby at school.
We don’t know how long our Twitter account will survive for this time. But even if it does, there are some threads which Twitter hides from its Search function, for reasons unknown. Try it yourself – search Twitter for any phrases from the text below. You won’t find them. (Also, some of you don’t use Twitter, so hey, new content for you!)
A handful of those threads mean something to me, so I’m going to preserve them here, unedited, for posterity, just in case. This one is from 24 November 2019. The tweet it references at the start is from a now-banned account so I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about lesbians being thrown off a Pride march.
[NB as it’s from Twitter, it’s a little bit swearier than you’ll be used to here.]
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I’m going to talk for a bit about why I care so much about this issue, because I know some of you are sick of it.
I’m opposed to the idea of self-ID on every possible level. It’s against science, it’s against reason, against tolerance, against women. But those are all intellectual, dispassionate judgements. They’re not the reason I feel so deeply about it.
(We haven’t had any contact from Twitter about it, people just noticed the account was live again last night and told us about it, so we don’t know what the reason was.)
It’s still quite a shocking read even half a decade down the line.
We’ve only actually had 93 posts on trans issues in those five years, or an average of about one every three weeks. We know it feels like more. And we know that some of you thought we’d gone mad when we started warning about it.
But hopefully some of you have realised just what’s at stake, and even if you don’t care about that, how much it might cost the cause of independence. We really hope we can stop talking about it soon, if only so we don’t keep getting banned from Twitter.
In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.
At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.
But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.
And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.
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.
