Wings has been regularly pointing out for the last 11-and-a-half years that by far the most reliable indicator of who’s going to win an election isn’t voting-intention polls, but “Who would make the best Prime/First Minister?” polls.
So the SNP should be really really alarmed about this.
Because those are some shocking numbers.
Everyone’s having a lot of fun with the farcical Hate Crime Act that will finally come into operation in Scotland in just a couple of weeks’ time, fittingly on April Fools’ Day.
Even by the Scottish Government’s abysmally rank standards of legislation over the last decade it’s an embarrassing binfire, with citizens being urged to rock up at fishmongers, mushroom farms and demolished tower blocks to report “hate crimes”.
And you’d have to laugh, except that might be a crime soon too.
There’s a Calvin And Hobbes cartoon we like to post on social media when someone’s got themselves in such a pickle that they’re just flailing around desperately firing off every slogan, argument or insult they can think of to get themselves out of it.
And so, wearily, to the SNP.
We’re reluctant to even mention the farcical, embarrassing goings-on in the House Of Commons last night, but the very short version is that the SNP somehow contrived to save Keir Starmer from an embarrassing mass rebellion of Labour MPs.
And in so far as anyone cared about them at all, the people of Gaza were the losers.
Well, imagine our surprise.
There was very little realistic prospect of any other outcome, particularly in light of the same judge – Lady Haldane – ruling last month that the definition of “woman” was not limited to biological reality.
In doing so she placed it beyond any credible dispute that the Scottish Government’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Act did indeed impinge on equality law reserved to the UK government, because the rules on who constituted a legal man or woman would have been different in Scotland and England.
But what now for poor beleaguered Humza Yousaf?
The writing, we mean. Because it’s not until you see it baldly written down in black and white that it really hits you how insane it is.
The SNP has 44 MPs now, and has not managed to enter independence negotiations.
Winning 29 seats would represent a LOSS of 15, or more than a third.
And they’re about to stand up in front of voters and insist that that would somehow compel the UK government to hand over what they’ve been flatly refusing since 2016.
(It’s all pretty academic anyway, obv, as we’ll be amazed if they get double figures.)
The very last shred of credibility has left the building, readers.
The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.
The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.
The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.
But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.
You can’t do this, you know. You just can’t.
These things cannot both be true.
Luckily, someone else has already said it for us.
The haunting words of a dead man, brought to you again on the exact anniversary of the day William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in London for treason against the English crown.
Three deaths for the price of one. RIP.
Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.
Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.
But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.
The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.
Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.
When Humza Yousaf was campaigning to be elected leader of the SNP, he pledged that he would be not only the First Minister, but also the “First Activist”. It transpired that this in fact meant chapping a few doors in Dundee, just down the road from his home in Broughty Ferry (and on the way to his Glasgow constituency).
But what might a real “First Activist” have done with the position and power?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
