Wings Over Scotland

This really is an extraordinary headline, for multiple reasons.

Because what actually IS “the rise of Reform”?

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It’s really very hard to overstate what mendacious, duplicitous shite this is.

It did its job, though. As expected, the SNP conference comprehensively voted down the rebel amendments to Swinney’s motion on independence “strategy” and backed his grand plan of winning a majority, begging Keir Starmer for a second referendum – just like Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf had done before him with Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – and then scuttling obediently away with his tail between his legs when Starmer told him to get lost.

(At one point he even boasted that he had a brilliant secret plan that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about, making us almost nostalgic for when Sturgeon used to say the same thing and some people actually believed her.)

One bit of the speech did catch our attention, though.

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It’d be quite hard to find an image that more completely summed up the wretched state of the SNP in 2025 than this one. Look at that tiny handful of miserable faces, sitting dejectedly around a near-empty function room. It’s so bleak Mike Leigh could make an entire movie out of it.

And we know what you’re thinking – that we sat through some internet livestream to find the most pitiful-looking freezeframe imaginable to show them in a bad light. But nope. Kevin Stewart MSP posted this cheery snapshot of his own free will on Twitter on Sunday morning, presumably in the hope of boosting party morale in some way.

Because things really are grim.

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There’s an interesting piece in the Sunday Times today.

They’re not the only ones.

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Say what you like about Nicola Sturgeon, but she’s not stupid. Releasing her memoirs when the Scottish Parliament is in recess has ensured acres of media coverage for what so far have been extremely anodyne “revelations” bundled up with barefaced and obvious lies of such startling audacity that it’s almost impossible to discuss them rationally. (Which is of course the point.)

But this extract from an interview to be aired on ITV tonight is actually interesting.

In it, Sturgeon doggedly continues to refuse to use male pronouns for multiple rapist Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, despite admitting that he IS male, instead calling him “they”. But it was the bit before that that raised our eyebrows.

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A little over two years ago, three SNP MSPs contested the leadership of the party in the wake of the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. All were full of grand plans and dreams for the future of the party, the nation and the independence movement.

None of the three is leader now, and in nine months’ time none of them will be SNP MSPs. Indeed, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none will be an MSP at all.

And that, readers, is not a sign of a party – or indeed a Parliament – in good health.

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It seems like almost every time somebody gets accused of rape, sexual harassment or any kind of horrible creepy sex-based sleaze in Scotland these days, the same face is always lurking around grinning in the background somewhere.

Can you guess who it is yet?

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet, scammers used to have to work a bit harder to cheat people than they do now.

A popular method was to advertise a “clearance sale” in the press. You’d see an ad in the Daily Record or a local paper for an event in a High Street location – typically a vacant shop – promising brand-new TVs for £20, microwaves for a fiver, toasters for £2.50 or whatever. So you’d show up on the day and it always worked the same.

There’d be the ringmaster on a raised platform, surrounded by loads of unmarked white boxes, and he’d start off by picking some “random” punter from the crowd and bestowing gifts upon him. This guy would walk away with armfuls of swag for £25 or something (doubtless just going straight round the back with them), and the real show would begin.

Next the ringmaster would say “Now, before we get properly started, who’ll give me £10 for what’s on my mind?” (that phrase, “what’s on my mind”, was always the same). And basically they were flogging a mystery box, invariably containing a few trashy trinkets worth a fraction of the cost.

Any chump who bought one would then be escorted out of the shop before opening it, on the pretence that the bargains on offer in these sales were so great that they were limited to one per person. (There was always security on the door, sometimes even cops. There’s nothing intrinsically illegal about selling mystery boxes, even mainstream chainstores still do it today.)

And that was basically it. The ringmaster would delay and delay, punting more mystery boxes and never actually getting to the bit where you could buy a specific item at a specific price, and after a couple of hours the event would close down and the would-be customers would disperse in disgruntlement.

Now here’s John Swinney.

He’s got a mystery box to sell you.

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Genuinely, can anyone tell us what the heck this actually means?

Because to us, it’s just meaningless quacking to fill a void.

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The entire Scottish media and professional-politician community is currently in a self-righteous froth about a campaign ad being run by Reform for the Hamilton by-election targeting Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.

Obviously none of the acres of press coverage trusts voters to see the ad and decide for themselves, because that simply isn’t how journalism works nowadays. You’re told that a bad thing happened – whether it be a campaign ad, a comedian’s joke or the supposed terrible abuse sent to a celebrity – and how outraged various pundits or other celebrities are about it, with the clear implication that you should feel the same, but you almost never get shown or told what was actually said.

So to start with, as a basic journalistic principle, here’s the ad itself in its entirety.

Now let’s look at what you’re being ordered to think about it.

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There comes a point when even the most liberal and tolerant have to ask questions.

The above clip comes from a 2022 fundraising dinner celebrating the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence. But Anas Sarwar seems to want to take things a little bit further than that.

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Yesterday the Scottish media gave Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman what she’s never willingly given anyone else – a platform on which to make her case.

Most did a very poor job challenging her on her outrageous comments about the Supreme Court, with BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime show being an especially wretched example of allowing the interviewee to ignore every question and then just ramble on endlessly about something else entirely, but LBC’s Gina Davidson was on top of her brief and put all the points that reasonable people wanted to be made, while giving Chapman ample time to answer uninterrupted.

Let’s break down how that went, with the help of our handy Bullshit Buzzer.

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