Way back in the day, the Lib Dems in particular, but also other parties and the “Better Together” campaign, were infamous for the “dodgy barchart” tactic.
And so degraded is the modern SNP, it’s now scraping the same barrel.
We were very pleased to discover this morning that Johnny Ball is still alive.
But even the man who managed to make maths fun for generations of children would be hard pushed to make sense of the SNP’s membership figures.
We were a little perplexed by this story.
Because, for startlingly obvious reasons, even the SNP hasn’t had the brass neck to do a general fundraiser for this election, with the police’s inquiries still going on into the whereabouts of the cash from their last big appeals.
But in fact the party has managed to wring over £100,000 from the most gullible of its remaining supporters in the days since the election was announced. It’s just been a bit more subtle about it.
BBC Reporting Scotland last night:
Truly, this is the bullshit that just won’t die.
Yesterday was “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, which was the 41st “special” day of 2023 so far for trans people.
(Including but not limited to International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; International Pronouns Day; International Transgender Day Of Visibility; Transgender Awareness Week and of course the whole of “Pride Month”, which is now an almost entirely trans-focused event).
Citizens of Scotland and the UK were solemnly instructed to “remember the many trans people whose lives have been tragically cut short by violence”, although weirdly none of the politicians issuing the orders actually named any.
However, since we’re endlessly being told that trans people are the most marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable members of our society, and that an actual “trans genocide” is currently in progress, we expect there have been loads.
Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.
So let’s see the final scores on the doors.
The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.
It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.
How it started, just one month ago:
And how it’s going:
But it’s quite a lot worse than it looks.
Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
There are terms beloved of politics activists and commonly used on social media which are a baffling mystery to the general public. We’ve spoken several times of the word “gaslighting”, which is understandably used as shorthand for quite a complex thing that’s difficult to describe concisely, but nevertheless acts as a barrier to understanding for anyone not overly political.
Today’s lesson is the term “DARVO”, and stars the Scottish Greens’ favourite rapist.
Let’s quickly see how it works.
In a SHOCKING REVELATION that NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED, it turns out that the people of Britain think that putting criminals with penises into women’s prisons maybe isn’t the absolutely best idea.
Just 24% of respondents supported the idea of intact males who’d committed even non-violent and non-sexual crimes being housed alongside women, while a mere 15% – all of them red-flag danger cases in urgent need of having their hard drives checked – thought that rapists and sexual assaulters with their dingle-dangles still swinging in the wind had any business being incarcerated with the vulnerable and traumatised females who make up most of the female prison population.
Four times as many wanted them locked up with their fellow male offenders, while it would appear that approximately a quarter of Britons are whimpering custard-witted doughbrains who didn’t understand the question.
We’ll leave you to digest this startling and unexpected news, readers.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
