Wings Over Scotland

It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.

Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.

To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.

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Alert readers will be aware of very considerable recent active involvement by Police Scotland in matters relating to alleged contempt of court with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond. A blog in April by Craig Murray gave some details.

So we were extremely surprised by a letter we received this week.

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This post was written by an SNP NEC member present at last week’s controversial Zoom meeting, who wishes to remain anonymous. Wings has verified their credentials.

A farce, a shambles, an incompetent mess. There’s no other way to sum up the NEC stitch-up of the Edinburgh Central seat last week.

Bad enough was the situation of the Glasgow Cathcart seat, over which my sources tell me it didn’t take long for someone in ministerial tower to realise “but what if Dornan jumps ship to an Indy list party, we’ve just given them a seat in Parliament to promote why our both votes SNP message doesn’t make sense.”

And of course those looking at what really matters in the near future were noting “we could already be relying on Derek Mackay to turn back up at Parliament – and for Mark McDonald to crawl out from the bus we threw him under – to survive a confidence vote if the inquiry doesn’t go our way, now we’ve just lost Dornan’s vote, the Greens are going to hold us to ransom…” 

Fast forward a mere day and James Dornan didn’t even need to threaten legal action to get that decision overturned.

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Symbolism matters in politics. What ostensibly can appear minor actions can have significant effect. Simply changing the names of things, whether from Londonderry to Derry or from the Scottish Executive to the Scottish Government (and swapping a UK-focused logo for a Scotland-focused one), were hugely important, signalling a new era and enthusing supporters.

Similarly, it’s been the case that as well as public actions of political leaders there requires to be mobilisation of grassroots supporters.

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So we guess this is an answer to our question:

But there are many more questions.

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It seems fair to say that the SNP’s shady, ugly coup d’etwats yesterday hasn’t gone down massively well. Social media was awash in pictures of cut-up membership cards and resignation letters, and some of the most moderate voices in the commentariat also decried the stitch-ups of Joanna Cherry and James Dornan.

The NEC meeting which forced through the new rules was held in secret and nobody knows who was present or who voted for what. Indeed, even the identities of the NEC’s members are largely not public knowledge.

But there’s one thing we do know.

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SNP MSP James Dornan is someone Wings always had a lot of time for, at least until his shameful and central role in the stitch-up of Mark McDonald – an act which was the foundation stone for all of the party’s subsequent chicanery. We can only speculate as to his motivations for doing so, and their connection or otherwise to a certain deranged and ambitious fantasist in his close circle.

But as anyone who’s watched The Usual Suspects (or GoodFellas, or pretty much any classic-era Bond movie) will tell you, the real villains have a nasty habit, once they’ve achieved their goals, of “tidying up” anyone who might link them to their misdeeds – especially if those people don’t fit the ideal of their brave new worlds.

So an old, straight, white, working-class male like James Dornan, who signed the SNP Women’s Pledge, was always likely to find himself propping up a motorway flyover at some point sooner or later, and thus it has proved.

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Out of 100, exactly how humiliated do you feel today on learning that the leadership of your party has so little faith in you winning the Edinburgh Central nomination fair and square – despite all your advantages, connections and long party history – that it’s had to stack the deck with such an unprecedented, transparent, embarrassing fiddle to try to get you in? Because tbh, if it was us we’d be too ashamed to show our face.

No rush, take as long as you like. Just like you’re doing with independence.

The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:

So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:

That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.

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Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.

Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!

But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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In the light of several news stories today, we thought it’d be useful to keep a record of which organisations and individuals had now publicly expressed strong reservations or outright opposition to the Scottish Government’s alarming and deeply illiberal proposed new Hate Crime Bill, and which had expressed support.

This list will be updated as required.

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