Wings Over Scotland

You can’t move on social media today without tripping over effusive tweets from SNP MPs and MSPs singing the praises of departed Westminster leader Ian Blackford and admiring all his achievements in the position over the last five years, although weirdly nobody has actually listed any of them.

Wings Over Scotland would like to pay its own tribute by remembering this line in the sand drawn by Blackford in August 2019 and on many other occasions.

Thank goodness he didn’t allow that to happen, eh readers?

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…until we can all start actually trying to achieve independence again.

(Unless they replace him with Kirsty sodding Blackman or something, obv.)

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Five and three quarters years ago.

If anyone knows when “this process” will have ended and we’ll get our choice – or indeed what she achieved for Scotland in the Brexit negotiations – do let us know.

It’s more than two years now since we published this article, but it’s worth quickly going over it again, because there’s nothing on Earth more tedious than boneheads on social media going “Oh, you slag off the SNP but what’s YOUR plan if you’re so clever?”, who haven’t bothered to read any of the dozen times we’ve already answered that question since 25 months ago.

This is it. This is our plan. Try listening this time, thickos.

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The SNP have been all over the place since Wednesday’s judgement of the Supreme Court. Astonishingly, the party hadn’t prepared an agreed line in the event of the Court ruling against it, with the result that various party figures had popped up with all sorts of different versions of what a supposed plebiscite election would mean.

The closest things to an “official” position were when the SNP’s Policy Development Convener Toni Giugliano, and former Glasgow city councillor and Nicola Sturgeon’s mouthpiece Mhairi Hunter (who’d dismissed the whole idea of a plebiscite election as “impossible” earlier this year), both suggested that a victory in a plebiscite general election would simply amount to another mandate to demand a Section 30 order.

The party’s Depute Leader Keith Brown, on the other hand, had claimed that winning such an election would produce independence by itself. But lest any Yes supporters get over-excited, on TV this afternoon Brown declared that the matter would have to wait at least a couple of years.

Why? Because apparently the SNP can’t be bothered with the paperwork.

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It’s nice to see the British media (and perhaps, if we might be allowed to dream for a moment, the law) catching up with Michelle Mone.

It’s such a shame nobody did any proper investigative journalism into what a crooked, venal chancer she is before now – seven years ago or even four years ago, say – or the country might have been saved a few billion quid. Ah well, you live and learn, eh?

Let’s get straight to the point: this is a straight-up categorical lie.

Since Wednesday’s events there’s been a lot of chatter and confusion on social media about whether the Scottish Government has the ability to trigger a snap Holyrood election and use it as a de facto plebiscite on independence.

The short answer, as we told you yesterday, is “officially no, in practice yes”. But that needs a bit of further explanation, so as usual let’s do the job of actual journalism that nobody else in Scotland can apparently be bothered to.

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This legendary soliloquy never rang more true than on 23 November 2022.

Let’s be methodical about it.

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So it’s official – Scotland is not a partner in the UK, but a prisoner. Supposedly equal signatories to a treaty, we were in fact captured in 1707, with no hope of release other than at the whim of our jailer. It is an outrage, but a wholly predictable one.

Nicola Sturgeon could have put the matter of Holyrood’s legislative authority to the Supreme Court at any point since she became First Minister in November 2014. More particularly, she could have done so in July 2016, after the UK voted to leave the EU, thereby triggering a clear and explicit condition of the manifesto on which the SNP were re-elected as the Scottish Government just weeks earlier.

Instead, she’s wasted a decade of your time and probably sold Scotland’s future.

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Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before, readers.

Because you won’t be wrong.

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As you might expect, our return to Twitter yesterday caused quite a commotion among the more sensitive flowers on the social media platform. At the head of the pouting mob was of course our dear old pal SNP MP Pete Wishart, who was clutching his pearls as usual about such terrible elements as ourselves – “vile abusers” – putting people off independence.

And at such times, it’s useful to remember how much he cares about independence:

Because by his own admission, Pete Wishart would sell out Scottish independence at its most crucial moment for the sake of getting to wear the Speaker’s silk gown – adorned on special state occasions with golden lace, frogs and a wig – in the House Of Commons and uphold all its ancient traditions like a good little Briton.

Scotland’s whole future, 300 years of struggle to regain control of its own destiny, could hang in the balance, held solely in the hands of one man, and rather than disappoint the grey eminences of the British establishment and risk being frowned upon in their oak-panelled subsidised dining rooms, Pete Wishart would say “No”.

(We don’t know if you get an even bigger pension for being the Speaker than the £50,000 or so a year that Wishart will trouser when he leaves the UK Parliament after 20 years of spectacular non-achievement, but we’d be prepared to hazard a guess.)

There’s a word to describe people like that, which is never used on Wings, but we’re making an exception just this once.