Wings Over Scotland

Way back in December 2019, when the SNP were once more returned triumphant, the mantra chant was of an independence referendum the coming autumn. Of course, coronavirus consumed 2020 but the reality was a referendum was never coming that year, irrespective of rhetoric. Neither planning, policy nor even funding was in place.

And those leading the chant, in Parliament or in public, knew it.

Now there’s come a new year, but sadly not a new dawn. The mantra chant simply moved on to the referendum being autumn this year. Again it was dutifully proclaimed in Parliament and public, long beyond the point of any credibility. And once again, the likelihood of it being held is all but nil unless strategy changes.

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Just for old times’ sake, during last night’s attempted coup in America we took a little dip back into the Yoonstream, the very special place on social media where the most deranged of Scotland’s Unionists hang out.

It didn’t disappoint.

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So here’s how long it took for Scottish transactivists to make the scenes in Washington DC tonight all about (1) them, and (2) me:

These people be crazy.

As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.

One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.

(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)

So let’s see what we know.

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No explanation is given for why “writer at large” Neil Mackay has suddenly conducted a “wide-ranging, exclusive interview” with “one of Britain’s most senior spy chiefs” for today’s Herald On Sunday.

As far as we’re aware absolutely nothing has happened in respect of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent” to make the subject topical. Maybe Mackay just coincidentally bumped into Sir David Omand down the pub or something.

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So, Joe Biden promised to erase women as a legal concept if he got elected, and then by a quite remarkable coincidence there was a small but possibly crucial swing among women of all colours and ages towards a President who boasts of “grabbing them by the pussy” and may well overturn Roe vs Wade (and more) if he wins again.

Who could ever have foreseen, etc?

(It’s also passingly ironic that if Biden does win – as he still may well do arithmetically, although we wouldn’t necessarily want to put a lot of money on him living long enough to ever actually reach the Oval Office after all the legal wrangling/civil war is over – it’ll be on the votes of white men overturning those of women and people of colour, who all counter-intuitively and inexplicably swung to Trump.)

In a world where almost every vote seems to be on a knife-edge, it seems the woke left still hasn’t learned how criminally, recklessly, suicidally stupid it is to alienate 70% of the population to feed the endless, insatiable narcissism of 0.7% of the population.

Quite aside from anything else, that’s because the only votes you secure by doing so are the votes of people who’d never have voted for Donald Trump in a million years anyway. The only votes you’re gambling with are those of the natural left. And even if only a tiny fraction of the alienated actually turn, it can be enough to change the world.

When we first saw this video on Twitter through bleary half-asleep eyes this morning, we thought it was a well-done satire. But no. He actually put it out himself.

There can surely in history have never been anything that demeaned both the office of President and the USA as a nation more than the image halfway through that video of him prancing around in front of Air Force One.

Today America decides its future. And dear lord, what a choice it has.

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Senator Claire Chandler is a Liberal Party member of the Australian Parliament. Some recent experiences she’s had send a very serious warning about the likely outcomes of the Scottish Government’s wildly unpopular new Hate Crime Bill. She’s graciously allowed us to publish this column she wrote on the subject.

Early this month I received a letter from Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner directing me to attend a compulsory “conciliation” conference with somebody offended by my comments about the need to protect women’s sport and women’s toilets and changerooms. You can watch them here:

Ironically, the complaint against me was about an opinion article I wrote about free speech. You can read it here and make up your own mind whether bureaucrats at the Anti-Discrimination Commission should be able to censor any Australian citizens for this kind of public policy discussion.

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The BBC ran a completely insane story this week about a transman (ie a mentally ill woman) who almost died of kidney failure because she didn’t tell her doctors what sex she really was. The standout paragraph was probably the one pictured below, in which the atom-brained narcissist imbecile explained to a startled nation that apparently having a mental disorder also changes your physical biology:

(Also, y’know, “cute and awesome!” is definitely how men talk.)

But anyway. When we commission opinion polls, we’ve often noted that in any given poll you can expect around 5-10% of respondents to vote for even the most seemingly ridiculous options – either as a “joke”, or because they’re too dim to have understood the question, or whatever.

And last week we thought we’d put that to the test.

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This week saw publication of the long-awaited Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report on alleged Russian interference in British affairs. Despite media hysteria, the report contained no new revelations, just all-too-familiar catastrophising about Moscow’s ill-defined “disinformation” efforts and warnings of the undue influence rich Russians (most of whom are actually Kremlin opponents) have bought themselves.

The most salient point for supporters of Scottish independence to consider was the allegation that Moscow’s interference efforts extended to the 2014 indyref. As Wings pointed out earlier this week, however, the “evidence” to support this sensational claim amounted to nothing more than a heavily-redacted single paragraph, citing “credible open source commentary” as its sole source.

A look at the paragraph’s accompanying footnote reveals the “credible open source” commentator was Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council. For those in the fortunate position of being unfamiliar with his work, Nimmo is known for, among other things, falsely identifying a Syrian-Australian blogger and a British pensioner as Russian bots – so clearly someone whose expertise should be relied upon to determine the extent of Russian infiltration into Scottish politics.

I mention this not simply to reveal the transparently amateurish nature of the ISC’s report but rather to offer a commentary on the SNP’s (predictably) disappointing response to its allegations.

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