Wings Over Scotland

You know what, Surrey Live, we think you’re probably right.

We DO think people will remember him.

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It stands for “Failed In London, Try Holyrood”, of course.

So enjoy The March Of The Rejects next year, as the SNP explains to you why you were wrong not to elect these candidates last year and gives you a chance to atone for your shameful error. You lucky people.

The Presiding Officer has finally reluctantly deigned to allow the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issues arising from Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife, in the shape of a debate taking place in the chamber this afternoon brought forward by the Scottish Tories.

We suspect that watching it will be profound waste of time and a grave danger to our monitor screens, but we’ll certainly at least tune in for the votes at the end, because which motion/amendment the Parliament puts its name to will be a revealing moment.

Let’s quickly run those through a translator.

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Some of our more alert readers may recall the events of four years ago this month, when a mob of SNP representatives all suddenly raged against the idea of (perfectly legally) “gaming” the Holyrood electoral system to produce a pro-indy supermajority.

Voters try to organise themselves to maximise their desired outcomes all the time (see various tactical-voting campaigns), and so do political parties – witness John Swinney’s current plans for a grand anti-Reform coalition. And of course, the SNP never objected to indy voters voting for a different party on the list if it was the Greens. The entire thing was just a poorly-disguised attack on Alba.

But even so, guess what? The rules just changed again.

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We don’t need a cartoonist today. How could he be funnier than this?

Please let us one day discover who the wailing colleague was.

It’s one of the most profoundly disappointing things about the last decade of Scottish politics that for about five minutes in 2015 we all thought that this awful dunderheaded foghorn was a bright new hope for the future.

But you live and learn. At least, some of us do.

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In April 2021, the SNP were still the undisputed masters of all they surveyed. A poll conducted by Ipsos MORI that month showed them on 53% of the vote for the Scottish Parliament, a jawdropping 33 points ahead of their nearest rivals.

When the Holyrood election a month later was held, they won 64 seats, one more than they had done in 2016. Yet despite having led a minority government without any significant difficulties for the preceding five years, Nicola Sturgeon chose to invite the Greens to form a coalition with her party, and the effect that had on the public’s view of the government was… well, let’s see.

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What with this poll apparently being such terrific news for John Swinney’s runaway popularity with the people of Scotland, readers might be wondering why SNP MSP Graeme Dey has apparently forgotten to include the actual figures or link to the source so that people can find out for themselves.

Or, y’know, you might not.

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Welcome back to what will hopefully be normal service after we’ve been spending the last few days battling off a determined and temporarily successful attempt at hacking the site. Apologies to those who had clicks intercepted and redirected to a malware site which tried to get people to download dodgy .EXE files, but our readers are far too alert to ever fall for such things so no harm should have been done.

So back to business, which for us often means pointing out things that have been said in newspapers that aren’t true, which brings us to last Friday’s issue of The National.

Because the above simply isn’t what happened.

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A couple of days ago a reader asked on Twitter if we thought Reform, who continue to lead in UK opinion polling, might allow a second indyref if they actually got into power, as it would for obvious reasons be hypocritical of them not to. And to be frank we dismissed it out of hand, because Nigel Farage is the ultimate British nationalist, he’d have no obvious political reason to, and since when did hypocrisy bother politicians?

And then last night a longstanding Courier/Press & Journal reporter (who despite that is an all-round decent chap and indy supporter) tweeted this:

And actually, on further thought, that’s not the craziest idea at all.

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We actually agree with John Swinney here.

The law – more specifically the Workplace (Health, Safety, and Welfare) Regulations 1992 –  is indeed “crystal clear”. It states, wholly unambiguously, that men and women must be provided with separate single-sex changing facilities, which could under NO lawful conditions include Dr “Beth” Upton and nurse Sandie Peggie at the same time.

The difficulty is that any minute now, someone is going to ask the beleaguered First Minister the staggeringly obvious question that arises from the fact, namely:

Why didn’t NHS Fife know that?

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