We’ve just come by the final agenda of the weekend’s meeting of the SNP National Council in Perth. (The National Council is an essentially toothless talking shop which the party abolished in 2018 but then reinstated this year in order to pretend members actually had any influence over policy.)
Click the pic to read the whole thing, but we’ve got the highlights.
Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.
Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.
But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.
We’ve used this video before, but it’s extra-apt today.
Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.
Even quite alert Wings readers may not recall our brush with thoroughly obnoxious SNP councillor (and former chair of the misleadingly-named Aberdeen Independence Movement) Fatima Joji, because it happened such a long time ago.
But sometimes when someone behaves particularly egregiously in their professional role you have to at least give the proper grievance procedures a try (although it can prove very expensive to do so), and 13 months ago that’s what we did. We still have no idea how close we may be to the end of the process, but we have an update.
The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.
Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.
At least, we assume there was a sizeable current being passed through it, as little else could explain the visibly uncomfortable half-hour experienced by hapless Stonewall chair Iain Anderson with Beth Rigby last night, or the seemingly random changes every few seconds in his facial expressions, body language and accent.
(Just about the only constant, other than his sweating top lip, was the deeply irritating modern phenomenon of stupid people starting every sentence with the word “So…”.)
If you’re a connoisseur of vacuous, nervous awkwardness you’re in for a real treat. If you want to see a human being actually answering any questions with even the tiniest shred of coherence, pertinence or honesty, maybe give it a miss.
We’ve seen some hilarious demands for “unity” in the independence movement in the last couple of years, almost all of them from the most divisive figures ever to wave a wee plastic Saltire (Pete Wishart, Neil Mackay, Wee Ginger Dug etc etc).
But this effort from the SNP’s new airhead mascot takes the shortbread.
Still wondering what Humza Yousaf’s going to say to the SNP’s pretend “conference” on independence strategy this coming Saturday? Well, wonder no longer, because this morning he told Sky News.
In other words, he’s waving the white flag and praying for a miracle.
Some of you still won’t have seen them, er, we mean “this”:
While it may have been the funniest – and Joanna Cherry silently spoke for every sane person in the nation as it went on – remarkably it wasn’t even the stupidest or most offensive part of her speech to yesterday’s Parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall about the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act.
Nicola Sturgeon has not been charged with any crime. Yesterday she was arrested, questioned and released without charge pending further investigation. We do not even know which specific suspected crime or crimes she was questioned in connection with, so it is manifestly impossible to meaningfully speculate on her innocence or guilt (save of course for the fact that all are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven otherwise, something Sturgeon herself often appears to forget).
Nevertheless, in Scotland the Contempt Of Court Act 1981 applies from the moment a person is arrested, as the country’s most senior lawyer and its official prosecution service were both keen to remind people yesterday in the clearest possible terms, and it applies equally whether you’re asserting someone’s guilt or their innocence.
So you need to be a really extra-special class of boneheaded numbwit to do this:
Wings two days ago: “The SNP wants to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.
The SNP today: “We’re prepared to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
