Wings Over Scotland

The great unknown in the SNP leadership contest is an extremely significant one: who are the voters? Nobody but Peter Murrell really knows how many members the party has, but almost nobody believes the claimed number of over 100,000. (Our guess, based on pretty much nothing but a gut feeling, is 75,000 plus or minus 5000.)

But more to the point, nobody knows who they are. The average member age in most political parties is over 50, and according to figures published in 2019, more than 80% of SNP members are over 40, with half of those being over 60. There’s also an almost 3:2 bias in favour of men.

So the sample on Newsnight last night was pretty representative.

And the segment illustrated the difficulty in predicting the result of the contest.

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Humza Yousaf will not be the next First Minister of Scotland. We’re calling it now. His trainwreck of a performance on last night’s leadership election debate on STV dealt a blow to his chances that we can’t see him recovering from, and the SNP establishment is now under such intense scrutiny over the electoral process that the chances of a fix being orchestrated by Peter Murrell are receding fast.

In the debate Yousaf declared that Nicola Sturgeon was the best politician in the UK, that he wasn’t as good as her, and that she’d failed to find a successful strategy for independence and therefore he couldn’t either.

So, um, that’s that, we suppose.

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The charity LGBT Youth Scotland is currently the subject of a live police investigation over its involvement in a second major child-abuse scandal in little over a decade.

So you’d expect Police Scotland to be taking that pretty seriously, right?

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Wings Over Scotland has been monitoring the BBC’s coverage of Scottish politics for over 11 years now, readers, and other than The Nick Robinson Incident we’re honestly struggling to remember seeing anything worse than this.

The Corporation’s “coverage” of Ash Regan’s campaign launch for the SNP leadership election ran for roughly seven minutes. And we suppose we should be grateful that it did at one point feature a brief, incidental cameo appearance from Ash Regan.

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Last night we tweeted this:

We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.

As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.

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The First Minister has gotten herself into quite a pickle.

But worse, there’s no way out of it.

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Get ready to curl your toes, readers, as the excellent journalist and author Ella Whelan puts economy-grade script-reading robot Jenny Gilruth of the SNP on the spot during tonight’s Question Time.

Despite having watched Nicola Sturgeon be tied in embarrassing knots by Douglas Ross on the same question hours earlier, Gilruth was powerless to deviate from the line that self-declared “transgender” rapists are a mysterious and separate species, neither male nor female – Schrodinger’s Rapists, if you will – because otherwise the SNP’s entire gender reform ideology dissolves instantly into mist.

Bepenised individuals who rape women – will we EVER know what they are? Judging by the groans of the studio audience as she blustered away vacuously, everyone in the room but Jenny Gilruth was already pretty sure.

We’re very busy today, but there’s always time for a chuckle.

She’s going to need to buy a ticket to get back into the stadium after that.

We’re not experts in the field, but we think this is what an actual feminist looks like.

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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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Footage from tonight’s glamorous dinner for the captains of the independence industry.

See you same time next year for the same speech again, gang.

In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.

At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.

But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.

And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.

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