The closure of the UK Parliament for the summer holidays this week marked the end of my first political “year” with the SNP Group at Westminster, albeit a truncated one under unusual circumstances. Having served in Holyrood much is similar and familiar, even if anachronistic in style and reeking of snobbery. Staff are remarkably helpful and individual members can be exceedingly pleasant.
But this isn’t our Parliament and we’re most certainly not amongst friends.
Maybe the flag could have been a bit bigger, but a solid 8/10 for the staunch rejection of all things nationalistic in this picture and tweet.
Jamie Halcro Johnston, incidentally, secured a whopping 4.1% of the Orkney vote for the Tories in the 2016 election, losing his deposit in the party’s lowest vote share ever (the nadir of a long slide from 23% in 2003), so we’re not absolutely sure he’s qualified to speak on behalf of the whole constituency, but we’ll let that one go this time in the light of such an absolutely stunning rejection of nationalism. Trebles all round.
The Scottish media is in a total frenzy this morning over the long-delayed publication of the “Russia Report” into alleged interference by Vladimir Putin’s regime in UK politics.
The Herald, Scotsman, Mail, Express and the i all lead their front pages with the story today, and the Telegraph did it yesterday. So we thought you might like to see the entirety of the indyref coverage that’s actually in the 55-page report.
But don’t worry, readers. The SNP have a cunning plan to secure independence by 2050, maybe, if they can find time in between letting rapists into women’s changing rooms, criminalising almost any sort of speech and stopping you getting cheap pizzas. No rush. There’s still a lot of MP wages and Short money to be claimed.
The Huffington Post published a poll today, to the great delight of the likes of Stonewall Scotland, which seemed to fly in the face of every previous one on the idea of gender self-identification, a policy which appears to have been dumped by the UK government but is still very much in favour with the Scottish one.
That the poll had been commissioned by trans uber-fundamentalist website Pink News immediately set off alarm bells, especially as the site had previously asked a similar question, found dramatically different results and swiftly disappeared them.
We’ve just been out for our evening constitutional in the relatively cool night air (Bath sweltered at an oppressive 30C today and Bear Patrol was pretty gruelling), and we thought readers might be interested in what we saw.
The city has observed lockdown with great diligence, as we’ve previously documented, and to be honest we’re not sufficiently familiar with the latest rules to say it wasn’t still doing so tonight. But a nearby park, around 9.30pm, was a disconcerting scene.
Now, as we noted earlier this month, that might just be down to people getting weary of false dawns. But it might also indicate that a measure of realism is belatedly beginning to dawn on the Yes movement about the lack of connection between nice poll numbers and actually securing another referendum.
