It’s worth remembering that they didn’t have to do this.
Labour had already announced their intention to abstain. There was no danger of the budget being defeated. So the SNP could have allocated however much money they wanted from their increased funding to the pursuit of independence.
And maybe they did.
People sometimes ask us if we get bored of being right all the time.
But in truth, we just wish we had to work a bit harder at it.
Earlier today we heard from the SNP’s depute leader Keith Brown that the party now accepts there will never be another UK-sanctioned independence referendum.
And this afternoon in the chamber the SNP also voted against the only alternative.
Alba MSP Ash Regan laid down the above motion, which supports what as far as we knew was still the SNP’s official policy in the absence of another Section 30, in so far as they even know what their policy is.
Today that motion was voted down by 125 votes to 1.
This must be some kind of mistake.
Because we’re sure you’ve spent the last decade telling us that just couldn’t happen.
When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.
You also come to expect injustice, like last night’s inexplicable failure of VAR – which has unfailingly spotted micro-infringements like a player’s toenail being offside – to even take a look at a nailed-on stonewall penalty in the last minutes of the game.
But because you’re so used to these things, you’re not expecting rage.
The SNP released their general election manifesto today. We’re not going to link you to it, because we don’t want to be responsible for wasting your time. This is everything it has to say on the party’s (cough) strategy for achieving independence.
It deserves much, much less respect than we’re giving it. Tomorrow, ice lolly reviews.
We’re still trying not to pay attention to the election because it’s so tedious and awful and pointless, but this is worth putting on the record because it’s in The National and otherwise nobody’s going to read it.
Short version: all the way back to surrender.
The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:
Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.
The picture editor of The Times must have been delighted with this gift.
But it’s a very accurate picture, and fairly used.
Comment seems superfluous, really.
So we’ll just make a couple of the obvious points for the sake of it and then we’re off to the park.
We’ve been thinking about this again.
Because we’re still more than two years out from the next Holyrood election, and it’s really hard to see how it’s going to pan out. So let’s throw some figures around.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
