Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.
Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.
This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.
Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.
Ridiculously, more than eight hours after voting closed in an all-electronic election in which “counting” should have taken a maximum of one second, and at 11.30pm, the SNP have released the results of this year’s NEC elections.
There are some big stories.
Alyn Smith is OUT as Policy Development Convener, replaced by Chris Hanlon.
The Herald has a story this morning about the Secretary of State for Scotland, a man who readers may recall promising that Scotland would benefit financially from the UK government’s £1.5bn bung to the DUP (which then didn’t happen), and threatening to resign over Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (which he didn’t do, then denied ever saying), and promising to do everything he could to oppose a no-deal Brexit but then abstaining on a vote to rule it out (and refusing to resign despite being a government minister who had refused a government whip).
It really takes some going to stand out for especially terrible journalism in the Scottish press this week, given the vast acres of page-space that are still being devoted to truly abysmal, and borderline legally-actionable, barrel-scraping articles about the recent allegations made against Alex Salmond. So hats off to perhaps the only man who could possibly have achieved it.
