Wings Over Scotland

At the end of last year we noted the unusual and persistent levels of divergence in Scottish political polling. As polls have become much more frequent during the election campaign, nothing about that has changed. The final polls, published yesterday, are so far apart from each other that they tell us basically zip.

Analysing this mess is meaningless, so we’ll just give you some highlights.

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To pass the time on (praise be to Baby Jeebus) the last day of the Holyrood election campaign, we thought we’d do a catch-up summary of all the seat projections we could find from last month and this month. Here it is.

Now, as it happens we think the potential seat ranges are significantly wider. There are so many factors of uncertainty that while there’s no credible doubt who’s going to be the biggest party, we reckon SNP seats could potentially be anywhere from about 47 to 68 (most likely the upper part of that range), with corresponding ramifications below.

But there’s one potentially interesting thing in that bottom half.

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Specifically, of the Single Most Toe-Curlingly, Face-Palmingly Cretinous Thing Said In The 2026 Holyrood Election Campaign, And Possibly Any Election Ever, Prize.

We mean, wow. We could easily write a 1000-word article purely on the top 10 things that are fatuously, obviously idiotic about those three short sentences, and so could you. So imagine how embarrassed the poor Daily Record must be today.

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For a nation that prides itself on hating the Tories, this is very odd.

And if you don’t see how, let us illustrate.

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It’s nearly over, readers. Just one more week of this to endure.

The most miserable Holyrood election campaign of all time will end next Thursday with an election which will deliver Scotland’s most miserable devolved government of all time. Only the exact form, colour and shape of the misery remains to be determined.

So as the SNP promise through forked tongues to cut the cost of living with a pledge they know full well they have no chance of being able to actually implement, while using the powers they DO have to INCREASE the cost of everything that makes life WORTH living, let’s look at exactly what flavour of dog vomit we can expect to be choking down along with our state-approved organic broccoli and fat-free gruel for the next half-decade.

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It’s hard to know where to start with the Sunday Mail’s lead story today.

Especially if one doesn’t want sent to prison.

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So that’s the full set of manifestos in.

You can download them all here in a oner, if you’re REALLY bored. But we don’t advise it, because we can just tell you what they say in a couple of minutes.

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It was exactly one year ago today that the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in the case of For Women Scotland Vs The Scottish Ministers, a judgment which has still not been implemented by the Scottish or UK governments, so it was quite bold of the SNP to choose it as the launch date for their manifesto.

The judgment (which the SNP are in fact still fighting in court) is not referenced in the document and the phrases “women’s rights” and “single-sex” do not appear anywhere in it, although it does say “We are committed to upholding and protecting the human rights of trans people as far as possible within our powers and we will do all we can to ensure that trans people’s identities are recognised and respected”.

So, y’know, more of the same to come for the next five years.

As all alert readers will know, this site likes to keep a watchful eye on the shady and disturbing activities of paedophilia-plagued charity LGBT Youth Scotland. So we were naturally intrigued to hear that they’d hired a new convenor last month.

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Blimey, AI Christopher Walken looks very very ill”, well, stay tuned, because this story gets more and more interesting.

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Alert readers will have noticed something of a minor furore in recent days around a boneheaded Scottish Greens candidate (as if there were any other kind) calling for the complete abolition of prisons.

So far Kate Nevens – who on the latest polling has a very reasonable chance of being elected on the list – has resisted calls to step down, which is probably for the best as, incredibly, her replacement would be even worse.

With the implosion of Your Party concentrating the nutter vote firmly in Green hands, the next term of the Scottish Parliament is set to feature the worst array of MSPs in Holyrood’s history, with almost everyone in the SNP with any sort of ability or experience resigning to be replaced by hyper-obedient young party drones, while the opposition are mostly putting forward the same old faces who’ve been such utter failures for the last 20 years.

It’s a grim prospect, but we do have a solution to propose.

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Let’s just deal with this quickly.

Because the truth is that we should all be quietly sending BBC Scotland bouquets in appreciation for doing the independence movement a favour for once.

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We think the lads at The Scotsman might have gotten a bit confused and/or carried away when it came to putting the clocks forward at the weekend. At 6am on Sunday morning they tweeted this:

But the link was a 404. We checked the print edition of Scotland On Sunday but there was nothing there either. Finally, though, the article has shown up in today’s paper and on the website, and to be honest with you, readers, we still think it must be some sort of mistake, because it’s two days early for April 1st.

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