Wings Over Scotland

Kevin McKenna has a piece in today’s Herald asking the question that is now the core issue for the Scottish independence movement.

The short version of the answer is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled”. But that does nothing to explain the fool’s mindset to us, or help devise a way to get them to accept it.

To some degree that’s because – as we saw so starkly in the “NO DEBATE!” tactics of the gender ideologly cult – part of the problem is that the built-in defence mechanism of the fooled is something George Orwell described in “1984”:

“CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”

What that means in practice is that the fooled never reflect on their own behaviour, far less enter into a meaningful discussion of it. In Orwell’s dystopian Oceania, that was to save them from torture and death at the hands of the Thought Police. More often nowadays, it’s simply to avoid humiliation on social media.

Either way, it’s vanishingly rare to hear someone elaborate on why they’re choosing to remain fooled. Which is why we’re so lucky today.

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The SNP conference opened today with Stephen Flynn (primary interest: the career of Stephen Flynn), Karen Adam (primary interest: any shiny or jangly object) and Susan Aitken (primary interest: MOAR PIES), which ought to be more than enough by itself to convincingly illustrate that these are not serious people.

But if you somehow still weren’t certain, there’s this:

That, readers – from Flynn, supposedly the party’s sharpest talent – is political strategising on the level of a football manager wearing his lucky underpants for a cup tie. David Cameron didn’t grant the 2014 referendum because he HAD to, he did it because he saw a political opportunity to kill off independence for decades by delivering a strong victory for the Union.

In the end he got away with the gamble, much more narrowly than he expected to, and no UK Prime Minister will make that mistake again. (Especially as Cameron foolishly DID follow it up with a repeat performance, over Brexit, and this time lost the vote and ended his political career.)

What’s embarrassing is not that Swinney and Flynn are publicly endorsing such an absolute joke of a “strategy”, but that they know it’ll be enough to see the SNP returned to government, where the strategy will fail (whether by not securing the majority or by doing so and having Keir Starmer briskly tell them to sod off), and they can safely trouser fat Holyrood salaries for another half-decade with all the pressure off.

But what if conference delivers a surprise defeat for the leadership during this afternoon’s debate? We don’t expect it to – conference is stuffed with the payroll vote these days, and holding it in Aberdeen yet again has made it as hard as possible for rebels to turn up en masse, short of booking a leaky bothy near Dounreay – but let’s allow it as a possibility just for the sake of argument.

What happens then?

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You know something’s shifty when a news account disables replies.

So let’s just have a quick investigate.

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We’ve written a number of extremely, painstakingly detailed articles in the last few months explaining why list votes for the SNP at next year’s election will be wasted, and will serve only to elect Unionist (and in particular Reform) MSPs.

Unfortunately, some people still don’t get it.

And that’s understandable, because super-detailed articles are long and people have terribly short attention spans nowadays, especially if there are large tranches of fiddly arithmetic involved. So let’s go the opposite way.

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We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.

Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.

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We’ve written a couple of articles about the media coverage of this already, but as the slow summer season continues it’s worth taking a little time to have a proper look at the source material, because it’s your cash that’s being spent on it, and used to shape public policy in Scotland.

And it’s very hard to overstate both what a waste of money, and what a colossal insult to every woman in Scotland, it represents.

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It can be very hard to follow the arguments of people trying to convince you to vote for the SNP on the regional list at next year’s election. Here’s one just a month ago:

So that’s clear – indy supporters MUST IGNORE the “siren voices” telling them to vote for smaller indy parties, because they can’t win any seats and therefore to vote for them is to “throw away” your list vote.

And this was them just two weeks ago, strenuously insisting that the small parties were a busted flush and there was no chance of a “non-SNP route to independence”:

So it was a bit confusing to read this yesterday:

Because all of a sudden, it seems that you CAN vote for the smaller indy parties, regardless of whether they win seats or not, because the list vote will actually be a de-facto referendum and the votes will still count. And indeed, apparently you SHOULD do so, because an SNP-only route – the thing which was the only hope a fortnight ago – is now “totally unachievable” and ONLY working in concert with the smaller indy parties can succeed.

Heavens, what huge transformative event did we miss?

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There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.

“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.

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You might think you’ve heard this tired old song before.

But wait! This one’s streamlined! Come back!

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Honestly, folks, I don’t even want to do this because almost nothing is more tedious for anyone else to read than two people having an internet beef – a lesson that I learned, ironically, from reading the site this post concerns, which does little else – but as well as reacting on a basic human level to someone being THIS deranged by hatred of you, it’s worth marvelling, like an elegant Victorian gentleman or lady taking a guided tour of an asylum, at how much insanity they can squeeze into a small space as a result.

And to detail the madness we have to start with that headline.

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Lacking anything better to do on a grey and cloudy day in Bath, we thought it might be a lark to go through every Holyrood constituency in Scotland and contemplate where it might go in next year’s election, based on the current state of polling.

And just to make things interesting, compared to our last assessment we’re going to give opposition parties the (often considerable) benefit of the doubt in a few seats for the sheer heck of it, and see if there’s any even slightly plausible outcome that means the SNP might win some list seats if all their voters vote for them on both ballots, or if they’ll waste a million votes for nothing and get dozens of Unionists elected like they did in 2021. [SPOILER: don’t prepare yourself for a surprise.]

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We must admit, we don’t quite get what the Daily Record is trying to achieve.

Having already told its dwindling band of readers that voting for both the SNP and Labour is the only way to stop Reform in today’s Hamilton by-election, for the last two days it’s deployed some random loony in a hard hat and the vegan former Rangers captain Graeme Souness to the same ostensible end.

Souness, famously a supporter of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives, tells Record readers today that they must vote Labour in order to prevent Thatcher’s right-wing heirs from winning the seat – even though Labour are dead, plucked, stuffed and cooked geese in the eyes of the bookmakers and voting for them only increases the chances of both Reform AND the SNP.

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