Wings Over Scotland

The last few days have been perhaps the most turbulent in the entire history of the modern Scottish Parliament. Proceedings have been suspended repeatedly, members of the public thrown out and threatened with arrest, filibusters attempted, carol services cancelled, tempers frayed and sittings going on until the wee small hours.

All of this has happened in the service of the policy that the SNP has made its flagship priority for the last two years and more – the destruction not only of women’s rights, but of the very CONCEPT of a woman.

So you’d imagine the party would have been tweeting about it constantly, keeping its supporters informed about all the dramatic events and the progress of the bill, if only to reassure them that they were determined to get it passed before the Christmas break come what may.

And yet strangely, up until it retweeted a tweet from The National about the bill finally passing a few minutes ago, the SNP Twitter account had not made a single mention of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in the entirety of the last week.

It certainly hadn’t been quiet – it’s been churning out scores and scores of tweets on subjects from the NHS to Rwanda deportations, the COP15 summit, Brexit, early learning, FMQs, winter fuel payments, International Human Solidarity Day, train fares, independence polls, the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, free school meals, income tax, drugs, net zero, industrial disputes, the cost of living and dozens more.

But there wasn’t one solitary word about the thing it just spent three solid days forcing into law. And since it was a thing that most of its own voters, and indeed a huge majority of all Scots, were opposed to, readers might be forgiven for thinking that they just wanted it all kept as quiet as possible, as if they were ashamed.

We suspect, and very much hope, that their wish may not be granted.

The National must have been enormously proud when it successfully fought off all the other newspapers to secure this stunning exclusive today.

We must admit, when we had a good look in the “Pete Wishart Victories” section of our extensive archives we drew a blank. So we were excited to read on and find out.

Read the rest of this entry →

So it’s now official: in Scotland the words “sex” and “gender” mean the same thing, except when they don’t, and if you give a man a piece of paper because he’s asked for one, with no sort of checks whatsoever, then it literally turns him into a woman, except when it doesn’t, unless it does.

Or put more concisely: the word “sex” in Scotland now has no meaning at all.

Read the rest of this entry →

Let’s be quite clear what this means.

It means that the new Westminster leader of the SNP thinks it’s “absurd” to even try to achieve independence while the UK is in a crisis.

Read the rest of this entry →

Same energy.

Although to be scrupulously fair to General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmany Melchett, he did at least actually launch an offensive from time to time, rather than just putting out occasional half-arsed discussion papers and press releases about it.

The SNP has for quite some time been a hollow shell of a political party. Like the Conservative Party, its members have been systematically stripped of all policy-making powers, with decisions of conference on major issues simply ignored and other policies pushed through (most notably “gender reform”) which have never been put in front of conference for debate at all.

The party is now primarily a vehicle for processing cash and funnelling it to carefully selected and ideologically vetted activists, mostly from the fundamentalist youth wing, who are given well-paid jobs working for MPs and MSPs or parachuted into council seats in return for their unquestioning loyalty to Nicola Sturgeon.

And at this, it must be admitted, the SNP is still a highly effective operation. Which is fortunate, because without UK government money it would be bankrupt.

Above are the Electoral Commission’s donation figures for the third quarter of 2022. They note that 100% of the SNP’s reportable income for that period came from the UK government’s coffers – a trait shared with Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the DUP.

Given that three of those four parties are nationalists committed to removing various constituent parts of the UK, one might almost be tempted to commend Westminster’s generosity. But perhaps it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s THAT day again.

Try to feign some interest, it’s only polite.

Can this really be six and a half years ago?

We suddenly feel very old.

Read the rest of this entry →

Word reaches us, readers, that Nicola Sturgeon was “furious” when she joined the most recent meeting of the SNP’s Westminster group by Skype. Her rage was driven by the suggestion that the party should trigger a Holyrood election to act as a de facto independence referendum, a policy we’re reliably told is supported by a number of MPs who are too scared of being browbeaten by Sturgeon in front of their colleagues to actually speak out in favour of it.

(We won’t mention their names at this point.)

Our source mentioned to us that they seemed to remember an interview in which the First Minister had revealed a possible reason for her extreme antipathy to the idea – one for the BBC’s extensive and rather good three-part documentary “Yes/No – Inside The Indyref”, which was broadcast in August 2019 and never seen again.

It’s not available on iPlayer or YouTube, but fortunately we happened to still have the show recorded on our Sky+ box, so we went to check, and lo and behold our source’s recollection was correct. Apologies for the slightly wonky quality of this video, as we had to record it off the TV screen.

We’ve transcribed it below.

Read the rest of this entry →