All one can hope is that this was an unfortunate slip of the tongue.
Otherwise, folks, you’ll just have to buck your ideas up.
As any moderately heavy internet user will tell you, it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have literally hundreds of browser tabs open at any one time.
Every now and again you’ll go to clean them up and find something that you’ve been meaning to write about in a quiet moment, and this certainly counts as a quiet moment in Scottish politics, so let’s do this one now.
Because the story above is from March, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone anywhere talk about just how weird it is, or what it tells us about the 2024 SNP.
(And Get Away With It)
You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.
Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!
We had to go and check for ourselves to make sure this really happened.
But it did.
When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.
You also come to expect injustice, like last night’s inexplicable failure of VAR – which has unfailingly spotted micro-infringements like a player’s toenail being offside – to even take a look at a nailed-on stonewall penalty in the last minutes of the game.
But because you’re so used to these things, you’re not expecting rage.
This is one of the strangest political campaign videos we’ve ever seen.
Join us as we try to make sense of it.
Well, what a nice statement of unity and tolerance this is:
And only slightly undermined by coming from THIS guy:
But Smith’s new message of tolerance hasn’t fully penetrated the party ranks.
It’s probably as good an illustration of the madness currently engulfing Scottish politics as anything that the most unusual suspect, Anas Sarwar, may have just – temporarily at least – saved Humza Yousaf’s job.
And although our head hurts already, we’ll try to explain why.
News reaches Wings this evening that Humza Yousaf has called an emergency meeting of the Scottish Cabinet at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, just a couple of hours before FMQs. (This information has been confirmed directly to us by a source very close to a member of said Cabinet.)
An emergency Cabinet meeting is an extraordinarily rare event. As far as we’re able to establish there have only been two during the SNP’s time in power – when the budget failed to pass in 2009 and Alex Salmond’s administration had to decide whether or not to trigger a general election, and one the day after the Brexit vote to supposedly plan a second indyref (LOL). But in any case they’re extremely unusual.
The subject of the meeting has not been disclosed to us. It could, for example, concern imminent developments in Operation Branchform, or it could relate to the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. The men in grey kilts may have come for the FM. Or Scotland could be about to declare war on Morocco or something. But we are told that the fact of the meeting taking place is a 100% certainty.
So no sleeping in tomorrow, readers. It’s probably going to be big.
Everyone’s having a lot of fun with the farcical Hate Crime Act that will finally come into operation in Scotland in just a couple of weeks’ time, fittingly on April Fools’ Day.
Even by the Scottish Government’s abysmally rank standards of legislation over the last decade it’s an embarrassing binfire, with citizens being urged to rock up at fishmongers, mushroom farms and demolished tower blocks to report “hate crimes”.
And you’d have to laugh, except that might be a crime soon too.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
