Wings Over Scotland

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.

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You can’t do this, you know. You just can’t.

These things cannot both be true.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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While idly browsing Twitter this morning, we made a startling discovery triggered by the SNP leadership election, and it was this: nobody in Scotland really knows what the nation’s law on abortion is.

It was prompted by these two tweets, both of which appear to be true:

The thing they agree on is that Humza Yousaf has just declared that he wants to change the law around abortion so that women can abort babies in Scotland solely on the grounds that they don’t like which sex they are. And that seems like something that should probably be bigger news.

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The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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…by which we mean “IQs in the history of the Scottish Parliament”.

Put a cushion on your desk before you start listening to this, gang, or you might hurt your jaw. Because surely nobody quite as paralysingly, catastrophically thick as this clueless, bumbling, deranged and dangerous imbecile has ever been allowed to make the laws of Scotland before. We wouldn’t let her make orange squash, to be honest.

And yes, we’re including Kezia Dugdale and Jamie Greene in that reckoning.

(If you weren’t aware, the UK government HAS now decided to use a Section 35 order to block the appalling Gender Recognition Reform bill. We support it wholeheartedly.)

A few months ago, we all had a good chuckle at Pete Wishart’s screeching 180-degree turn on the subject of using a plebiscitary election for independence, a strategy which switched overnight from “suicidal, disastrous fringe lunacy with no hope of success” to “genius plan Nicola herself came up with”.

But after that crude ad-hoc field patch, we’re delighted to be able to report that Pete has submitted himself to SNP HQ for a full operating system update and is now fully compliant with the New Truth.

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The newest Panelbase poll, which shows a narrow lead for independence, was an “omnibus” one with questions provided by multiple clients, including Wings and the Sunday Times. The questions we’re about to show you were asked by the ST rather than ourselves, but their results are deeply disturbing on multiple levels.

The first one is perhaps predictable but still unsettling. (Click all pics to enlarge.)

A huge 2:1 majority of Scots believe the Scottish Government’s proposed new “gender recognition” laws pose a safety risk to women. Tory voters think so by almost 9:1, Lib Dem voters by almost 6:1, and Labour voters by nearly 2:1.

That can only partly be explained away by partisan party loyalty – Labour and the Liberal Democrats both support the bill, but their own voters are still strongly against. More noteworthy is the fact that (excluding Don’t Knows) even slavishly loyal SNP voters agree with the statement by a smaller but still clear 12-point margin, 56 to 44.

So let’s say it unambiguously: most SNP voters think the SNP’s gender reforms pose a danger to women’s safety.

But that’s not the disturbing bit.

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