Wings Over Scotland

A week ago, readers, I had not the slightest interest in bringing Wings Over Scotland back full-time. I had my Twitter account again and was having fun and I was happy with that. It scratched the itch of being able to engage with politics (and people) without the depressing business of wading in it for work.

Having enjoyed a summer of long sunny walks feeding the swans and refreshing lager shandies in riverside pubs, I was preparing to hunker down over the cold dark winter and finally get some much-delayed writing for the Wings memoir done.

And then I witnessed the quite extraordinary sight of an elected member of Parliament, in the shape of the SNP’s pico-witted ambulant brain vacuum Karen Adam, publicly gloating about having managed to shut down the voice of someone critical of her party.

At the same time, an extremely minor blogger (the word “rival” would be to over-dignify them) re-opened hostilities in his campaign of self-declared “open warfare” against this site, with a rapid succession of posts (just a few of dozens) forming such a demented scattershot tirade that to patiently debunk all of it would have taken until Christmas.

And I’ll be honest, folks, it all pushed my buttons a wee bit. It really shouldn’t have, but it was properly outrageous and I’m occasionally human, so I thought “Sod it, if I’m going to have to put up with all this crap anyway I might as well make it worthwhile”.

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Do you remember, readers, how the next UK election was supposed to be a single-issue de facto referendum on independence if the Supreme Court ruled Holyrood didn’t have the power to hold one itself?

Well, it appears that policy has been abruptly and quietly ditched.

Because just a couple of hours ago SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford told BBC News that “I can assure you” the SNP “will have a growth manifesto” for the whole UK whenever the next election comes around, because in his view the UK economy hasn’t been growing enough for the last few decades and the SNP would have a plan to fix it. Because apparently fixing the UK is the SNP’s purpose now.

Guess we better hope for a good result from the Supreme Court, then.

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Sometimes even fools and liars and charlatans speak the truth.

Thing is, we rather liked it when the horses south of the border were frightened. Things happened in those days. But to coin a phrase, those days are past now.

News update: Alexandria Adamson has been suspended from the SNP and his Twitter account is gone after our article on Tuesday. But in case anyone thought sanity had broken out in the party, this person, and many more like him, are still on its payroll.

And you really should be worried about that.

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You know how the SNP are always going on about how bad the Tories are and how urgently we need to get rid of them? Well, it turns out they don’t want that to happen for at least a couple of years. They just want a different Tory as Prime Minister, even though they keep telling us that Boris Johnson is the greatest recruiting sergeant for independence there could be.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

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Half a decade apart, almost to the day.

So what are we expecting?

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…to all the pathetic, craven, cowardly excuses for politicians in both Scotland and the UK who think that they can blithely keep doing TV interviews and radio call-ins where they dodge the question of what a woman is all the way up to the next election, and thereby knowingly facilitate the criminal mutilation and sterilisation of children and the sexual abuse of vulnerable women in hospitals, prisons and rape refuges.

I am living for the day when someone in the Scottish media finds some courage from somewhere and asks Nicola Sturgeon, because she’s going to blink so fast her face might catch fire. But that phone will just keep on ringing until someone answers.

Just for a little bit of fun. This is actual footage of North Korean TV news (source: NK News) from today, but I thought it deserved a more moving soundtrack.

Craig Murray’s speech to the Alba conference yesterday, delivered by his wife Nadira.

Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.

Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.

This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.

And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.

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