So we were a couple of days early on this one.
In fairness to the Scottish press, it’s had a lot of stuff to fit in recently.
This is the SNP members’ website tonight.
Looks like anything goes, folks.
Tonight’s debate on Sky News between the three SNP leadership candidates was yet another inconclusive low-scoring draw, with each contender taking a few hits (almost all from host Beth Rigby) and also landing the odd blow on each other.
The most notable of the latter was probably when Ash Regan gave Humza Yousaf a rather uncomfortable time over his claiming credit for the Queensferry Crossing when he was Transport Secretary.
As well as frantically trying to deflect by pretending Regan had attacked the SNP’s record on the project in general, Yousaf insisted that he’d played a major role in the bridge’s delivery. So let’s just check the timeline.
While idly browsing Twitter this morning, we made a startling discovery triggered by the SNP leadership election, and it was this: nobody in Scotland really knows what the nation’s law on abortion is.
It was prompted by these two tweets, both of which appear to be true:
The thing they agree on is that Humza Yousaf has just declared that he wants to change the law around abortion so that women can abort babies in Scotland solely on the grounds that they don’t like which sex they are. And that seems like something that should probably be bigger news.
We got up this morning intending to do a funny little piece about how Humza Yousaf’s attempt to fiddle an online poll on The National had spiralled into farce last night, with rival teams of bots spamming the poll with over 400,000 extra votes in 12 hours.
But then something a bit more significant happened.
Because a compulsory strike-off notice being filed in the First Gazette is a warning that a company is about to be dissolved.
Firstly, some of you owe us money.
But much more importantly, why now?
Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland’s press this morning that despite her weariness, she could have managed a few more months or even a year as First Minister, which would at least have got her halfway to keeping her promise to serve a full term if she was elected in 2021.
Which just makes her timing all the harder to explain.
Last night we tweeted this:
We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.
As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.
There are terms beloved of politics activists and commonly used on social media which are a baffling mystery to the general public. We’ve spoken several times of the word “gaslighting”, which is understandably used as shorthand for quite a complex thing that’s difficult to describe concisely, but nevertheless acts as a barrier to understanding for anyone not overly political.
Today’s lesson is the term “DARVO”, and stars the Scottish Greens’ favourite rapist.
Let’s quickly see how it works.
Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:
Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.
Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.
Well, it’s hardly before time.
But isn’t that the Scottish Greens co-leader in that picture, in the bunnet, between his colleague Ross Greer and Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, all enthusiastically clapping Douglas just a few weeks ago?
The title of this article might sound a bit like the name of a band making their debut at Glastonbury this year, but in fact it’s something infinitely more serious.
News broke late last night that the person we must presumably now refer to as an “individual” who had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of a missing Galashiels schoolgirl (happily found safe and well and back home with her parents) had in fact been charged with an as-yet-unspecified crime.
But the alleged crime wasn’t the only thing going unspecified.
People across Scotland breathed a sigh of relief this morning when missing Galashiels 11-year-old Kaitlyn Easson was found safe and well after a multi-service search.
The police have arrested [EDIT: and now charged] a 53-year-old man in connection with her disappearance, named by the Daily Record as Andrew Miller, a local butcher. This was one of two names that numerous sources had been passing to Wings since the man was detained, but the two names only referred to one person.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
