Wings Over Scotland

As well as the SNP NEC elections, the weekend saw the election of the first committee of a new grassroots independence organisation which is unfortunately and hopefully temporarily going by the stupendously terrible working name of “Yes Alba”.

15 people were elected to its ruling body by the votes of hundreds of delegates, with the top-ranked picks including SNP MP Angus MacNeil and former SNP MP George Kerevan. The majority of the successful candidates (eight) were female, even though there were no quotas or women-only shortlists imposed, and a wide range of ages was represented from young activists to former UK ambassador Craig Murray.

(We have no idea about any of their sexualities or gender identities, and also no interest in knowing, because those things have not the slightest bearing on their ability to fight for independence and are frankly none of our damn business.)

But that wasn’t good enough for Team Woke.

On a day when Joanna Cherry had a grown-up, reasoned and constructive column in The National calling for unity in the pursuit of independence, the outpouring of snide, sour sneering from a faction still raging with bitterness about being routed on the SNP NEC is instead curdling Twitter even as we speak.

And embarrassingly, not a single one of them has actually bothered to check even the most basic facts.

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We must admit, the terrible people that we are, we’ve been enjoying watching today’s extended meltdown by the SNP’s woke faction about last night’s NEC election results. Because it appears their egos are so huge that they’re not even smart enough to play dignified to spoil our schadenfreudish fun. It’s been full-on public tantrums.

But this nonsense needs briefly addressing.

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We couldn’t help but chuckle yesterday when the £100K-a-year Westminster MP and obsessive Wings Over Scotland reader “Pension Pete” Wishart announced – in the space of six minutes – that this site was simultaneously an irrelevance that nobody listened to, but also somehow one of the greatest threats to independence.

It got a lot funnier today, though.

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We don’t mind admitting we were quivering with anticipation, readers.

So let’s go.

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One of the dumber things we see regularly posted on social media is that Yes voices should stop criticising the First Minister because her leadership is the only reason Yes is now consistently ahead in the polls and we would have no chance of winning a new referendum with someone else in charge.

This is obviously nonsense, because Nicola Sturgeon was SNP leader and FM for five years in which support moved barely a single millimetre, until COVID-19 came along. Our current lead is due entirely to a tiny invisible virus and a giant Etonian buffoon.

But you know us, readers – we like to check.

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A reader alerted us to this. (You can skip the first minute.)

It’s a book currently being given to P1 children in Scotland, via the Scottish Book Trust. (We’re sure that by Christmas it’ll be getting read to them in class by drag queens.) And it’s something that people should probably be concerned about.

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Lavish expenses recipient Pete Wishart MP doesn’t want to talk about Wings.

So that’s probably the end of that.

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Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.

Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.

The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.

These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).

Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.

(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)

We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.

So, Joe Biden promised to erase women as a legal concept if he got elected, and then by a quite remarkable coincidence there was a small but possibly crucial swing among women of all colours and ages towards a President who boasts of “grabbing them by the pussy” and may well overturn Roe vs Wade (and more) if he wins again.

Who could ever have foreseen, etc?

(It’s also passingly ironic that if Biden does win – as he still may well do arithmetically, although we wouldn’t necessarily want to put a lot of money on him living long enough to ever actually reach the Oval Office after all the legal wrangling/civil war is over – it’ll be on the votes of white men overturning those of women and people of colour, who all counter-intuitively and inexplicably swung to Trump.)

In a world where almost every vote seems to be on a knife-edge, it seems the woke left still hasn’t learned how criminally, recklessly, suicidally stupid it is to alienate 70% of the population to feed the endless, insatiable narcissism of 0.7% of the population.

Quite aside from anything else, that’s because the only votes you secure by doing so are the votes of people who’d never have voted for Donald Trump in a million years anyway. The only votes you’re gambling with are those of the natural left. And even if only a tiny fraction of the alienated actually turn, it can be enough to change the world.

In today’s Sunday National:

Well, that’s good to know. Which members exactly?

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Holiday Boy is off for the next fortnight, readers, but there’s no way he’d have come up with anything funnier than this anyway.

We’re not sure he’s got the name right. But we’ll add that one to the list.