Wings Over Scotland

Let’s break this down, shall we?

Won’t take long.

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Writing about the Hate Crime Bill in the Herald today, Kevin McKenna summarises in a sentence a point this website has been making for many months.

Because the real question about the SNP’s sudden demented obsession with focusing the public’s attention on its most unpopular policies right before supposedly the most important election in its history isn’t “Why?”

It’s “Why now?”

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Last week we warned you to beware of poll questions containing the formulation “Does [X] make you more or less likely to vote in a certain way?”, and this evening Survation have provided us with an example of why.

According to those numbers, the conflict between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon has caused a staggering 47% of Scots to change their likelihood of voting Yes in an independence referendum. And the bulk of those – 37% – say it’s made them MUCH more or MUCH less likely to vote Yes.

Those numbers break by more than 2 to 1 (23% to 11%) in favour of “much less likely”, which is a margin of change (12 points) bigger than almost any Yes majority that’s ever been recorded in a poll.

In other words, if the poll is to be believed, Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to neutralise Alex Salmond as a threat to her personal political power has almost definitely turned a Yes vote into a No vote as people have started paying attention to it.

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We’re assuming, naturally, that the First Minister will be duly suspended from the SNP while these shocking allegations are fully investigated, just like Gareth Wardell, Denise Findlay, Neale Hanvey, Mark McDonald, Michelle Thomson, Neil Hay, etc etc etc were.

We’re not, of course. And nor should she be, because “shared a platform with” is the ugly ginger stepchild of fake-outrage cancel culture – lower on the smear scale even than “liked a tweet by” or “linked an article by someone who completely separately had an unfashionable opinion on a completely different subject several years ago”. It’s absolute guff punted only by scumbags.

Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact is that those are precisely the crimes for which other people WERE suspended and/or ostracised from the party, and we can’t help wishing the SNP’s flagrant hypocrisy about it was just a little bit less obvious and less arrogantly blatant, so that it wasn’t quite so painfully offensive to any decent person, and so that we weren’t having to fight quite so hard to keep believing in independence when we see the grim state of the Scotland that’s taking shape before our eyes.

But hey, we are where we are.

We took the day off today because we didn’t trust ourselves to watch the Hate Crime Bill debate without doing something violent. By all accounts it was the smart call.

While the debate overran and will conclude with a vote tomorrow, there’s no suspense about the outcome. With the backing of the snivelling, hateful, misogynist Greens (one female MSP out of six, entirely by choice), the bill will pass and Scotland will become a country where almost anything you say could be a hate crime.

The bill is designed to terrify normal people into silence about almost any subject, as an automatic habit. Even in your own home you won’t be safe from denunciation.

And while an amendment by Adam Tomkins of the Scottish Tories – it has come to the stage, readers, where we’re reduced to needing the Tories to try to save us from the SNP – should help a lot of people escape being convicted, that’s not even the point. Malicious, vexatious complaints will have put them through months of worry and fear, effectively punishing them even though they’re innocent, and most people – especially women – will simply hold their tongue to avoid the trauma.

For the last couple of years this site has been critical of the SNP’s failure to make any sort of progress on independence. But this is far, far worse even than that. Because if they somehow miraculously achieved independence tomorrow, we’d be afraid to live in the Scotland they’re creating.

Our country doesn’t have a SINGLE political party remotely fit for government. Voters in May face a choice between the evil, the stupid, and the evil and stupid. And they can’t even be angry about it, because even the politest anger is now a hate crime.

We wish we had a constructive course of action to suggest to you, folks. But we don’t, because democracy has failed you. There is no way you can vote that will fix the ruins the SNP have made of Scotland. We cannot see a way forward. It is becoming nearly impossible to evade the conclusion that all is lost. Nicola Sturgeon has destroyed it.

When we suggested yesterday that the SNP was turning into New Labour, we didn’t expect them to go to quite so much trouble to provide us with a timely illustration.

In happier times, almost seven years ago, a united and focused Yes movement had a bit of fun at the expense of Labour MP Ian Murray when he had a huge pearl-clutching fainting fit over someone putting a couple of stickers on his constituency office.

Record-scratch and jump-cut to the 2021 SNP.

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It brings us genuinely no pleasure at all to report that events in Scottish politics are panning out exactly the way we’ve been telling you they would for nearly two years.

Because this is the worst of all possible worlds.

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Like an old man getting up for the fourth time in the middle of the night, the Scottish Government has squeezed out another little dribble of its legal advice in respect of the conduct of its shambolic investigation into false allegations against Alex Salmond.

And to push that gross analogy to its outermost limit, it must have found releasing one of the documents in particular as painful as passing a rather large kidney stone.

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It’s not a parody account, we checked.

Your guess is as good as ours, folks. Perhaps all other women were unavailable.

Yesterday’s evidence session at the Fabiani inquiry had several standout moments, but by a narrow margin this was our favourite.

And just in case you were wondering, yes, that IS Scotland’s top prosecutor, the Lord Advocate, chief of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, James Wolffe QC, repeatedly refusing to tell an MSP whether or not it’s a criminal offence in Scotland to refuse to comply with a court-ordered search warrant.

So next time you’ve ramraided a load of iPads and the polis come knocking on your door asking if they can have a nosy around your attic for them, just tell them they can’t come in because it’s a matter of your motivations.

Let us know how that works out for you.

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We’re just watching today’s session of the Fabiani inquiry, featuring the Lord Advocate, the Crown Agent and the Principal Crown Counsel. There’s been an extremely long preamble from both Fabiani and James Wolffe mainly concerned with the anonymity order passed by Lady Dorrian during (not before) Alex Salmond’s trial, which is the foundation stone of everything crooked that’s happened around the Salmond case.

The order – and for clarity we make no suggestion whatsoever that this was its intent – is the basis for every piece of evidence that’s been suppressed in the inquiry, and for the prosecutions of Mark Hirst, Craig Murray and others, and also for the threats of prosecution issued to this site, The Spectator and to Alex Salmond himself, preventing him giving his evidence in full to the inquiry.

And we couldn’t help wondering how different things would have been, how much less damage would have been done to the integrity and credibility of the entire Scottish political and legal establishment, if it hadn’t been for this guy.

Byline Times court reporter James Doleman – extraordinarily, as he’s a specialist court journalist and as such knows the rules better than most – tweeted the name of one of the accusers very early in the trial to almost 40,000 followers, almost causing it to collapse. It was his doing so that directly led Lady Dorrian to pass the anonymity order – in Scotland, such orders do NOT apply automatically as they do in England.

(Doleman was not prosecuted for actually naming one of the women, although Craig Murray still awaits a verdict, five weeks after his trial, which could see him imprisoned for up to two years for merely allegedly hinting at their identities.)

Without the order, it would have been perfectly lawful for people to discuss the names of the complainers – whose allegations the jury found to be false – after the trial. It would have been possible for people to know, and form an opinion based on, who they were and who they were connected to and what the “plan” they were “mulling” was.

But because it isn’t, Scotland has been turned into a laughing stock – a byword for ham-fisted corruption and malice – the independence movement has been torn in two, and the Scottish Government itself may yet collapse.

So, y’know, thanks for all of that, James. Great job.

Utterly Insane Demented Crazy World version:

And in English:

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