We’re still retired, but this just can’t go unremarked.
This is absolute banana-republic stuff. Even before you get into any of the specifics of the case, it’s simply not the Crown Office’s job to interfere with a police investigation by telling them who they may and may not interview under caution.
Scottish justice is extremely seriously compromised.
As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.
In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.
The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.
Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.
If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.
Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.
We had some poll questions out with Panelbase last week. The results were in most ways wholly unsurprising, in line with all previous polls on the subject. Here they are.
To: Humza Yousaf (Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care), Shirley-Anne Somerville (Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills) and Clare Haughey (Minister for Children and Young People)
28 April 2022
Dear Mr Yousaf, Ms Somerville and Ms Haughey,
Cass Interim Report: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – Implications for Scotland
In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.
It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)
April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.
…to all the pathetic, craven, cowardly excuses for politicians in both Scotland and the UK who think that they can blithely keep doing TV interviews and radio call-ins where they dodge the question of what a woman is all the way up to the next election, and thereby knowingly facilitate the criminal mutilation and sterilisation of children and the sexual abuse of vulnerable women in hospitals, prisons and rape refuges.
I am living for the day when someone in the Scottish media finds some courage from somewhere and asks Nicola Sturgeon, because she’s going to blink so fast her face might catch fire. But that phone will just keep on ringing until someone answers.
The trans-sex-role-stereotype movement has put what would have been concealed and kept behind closed doors on centre stage. This is why normal, decent men look aghast at other men’s behaviour while many women sigh with an ‘oh, this again’.
The woke bloke contempt for women is clear and abusive behaviours are on full display. Reading through Lundy Bancroft’s pivotal work “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men”, the full cast of characters is present on Twitter, in the news and in our political parties and institutions.
Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?
The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse.
We just don’t seem to care.
We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.
So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.
We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.
The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.
So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.
I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.
My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.
Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.
Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.
This is the last piece of data from our recent Panelbase poll.
Click image to enlarge. Full data tables here.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
