This afternoon’s FMQs was a new low in the career of the First Minister, in which she haplessly let herself be comprehensively humiliated by Douglas Ross, of all people.
Worse than that, though, is that she must surely now be expelled from the SNP.
Hey, we don’t make the rules.
We’re very busy today, but there’s always time for a chuckle.
She’s going to need to buy a ticket to get back into the stadium after that.
This is incredible.
We couldn’t put it better than Alba MP Neale Hanvey, who said:
The SNP are a flailing shambles of incompetence, under a leader fast losing her iron grip on her own party as they watch her turning it into a laughing stock with growing horror. More and more disquiet reaches our ears from within her increasingly leaky and nervous Parliamentary groups. Who will be the first to tie their courage to a flagpole and make the move to mutiny? We can only wait and see.
Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.
BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)
On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)
She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.
Last night we couldn’t help chuckling at this.
Because as someone else on Twitter mocked, what’s actually laughable is the idea that criminals would never engage in any kind of deception in order to commit crimes, and that someone like Peter Tatchell would be so idiotic as to suggest such a thing.
But tonight it’s not even blackly comic.
Our sinister network of shadowy agents informs us that the document below has just been sent by Murray Foote to all SNP Parliamentarians. (Click to enlarge.)
It would appear that the SNP is feeling some heat.
The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.
Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.
…by which we mean “IQs in the history of the Scottish Parliament”.
Put a cushion on your desk before you start listening to this, gang, or you might hurt your jaw. Because surely nobody quite as paralysingly, catastrophically thick as this clueless, bumbling, deranged and dangerous imbecile has ever been allowed to make the laws of Scotland before. We wouldn’t let her make orange squash, to be honest.
And yes, we’re including Kezia Dugdale and Jamie Greene in that reckoning.
(If you weren’t aware, the UK government HAS now decided to use a Section 35 order to block the appalling Gender Recognition Reform bill. We support it wholeheartedly.)
A few months ago, we all had a good chuckle at Pete Wishart’s screeching 180-degree turn on the subject of using a plebiscitary election for independence, a strategy which switched overnight from “suicidal, disastrous fringe lunacy with no hope of success” to “genius plan Nicola herself came up with”.
But after that crude ad-hoc field patch, we’re delighted to be able to report that Pete has submitted himself to SNP HQ for a full operating system update and is now fully compliant with the New Truth.
One of the most memorable lectures I had as an undergraduate student at university was on Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros”, a defining work of the Theatre Of The Absurd genre. It is both a timeless and timely text, on a par with 1984 or The Crucible.
During the opening scene, the everyman protagonist Berenger sits having coffee with a friend. Midway through their conversation, a rhino charges past the café. Berenger is startled and concerned but his friend seems unperturbed, in denial that they even saw a rhinoceros.
Throughout the rest of the play, Berenger watches in incredulity and terror as, one by one, every person around him, colleagues and friends, transform into rhinoceroses, the cause seemingly being part-infection, part-capitulation.
In the final scene, he stands at his window looking out over the carnage, and in a moment of desperation, tries to force himself to transform into a rhinoceros. Despite his efforts, he is unable to and upon regaining his senses, vows in a hopeless frenzy that he will never capitulate.
This is a quite extraordinary thing for a grown adult to say.
When a reader quoted it in a comment earlier today we were reluctant to believe it. Googling the words produced only a broken Facebook link and a Scottish Daily Express story (and the Wings reader’s comment), which obviously did little to disperse the scepticism.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
