Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will probably have noticed that earlier today we featured a post by SNP MP Kenny MacAskill making the seemingly-unsurprising statement that the purpose of his party is to “bring about the end of the British state”.

So we thought he might have wanted to check with his colleague Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokeman and an obsessive Russophobe, when we saw a snide quote from him in a Belfast Telegraph story disparaging former leader Alex Salmond (who’d advocated the reunification of Ireland during a chat with ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern) for the heinous crime of “proposing the disruption of the United Kingdom”.

It later transpired that there’d been an error and the quote should have been (and now is) attributed to a Scottish Conservatives spokesman.

But we couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of shock with which the comment was received on social media in the several hours between its publication and correction, as if nobody thought it at all implausible that McDonald would have said such a thing. (And indeed, it’s barely different from what he HAS said about Salmond’s RT show.) There were plenty harsh criticisms of him, but we didn’t see a single tweet suggesting that a mistake might have been made.

Never more so than in 2020, sometimes fiction is more believable than truth.

I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet, here we are.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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Just an SNP activist tonight, saying that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament or not, and that it’s undemocratic for a new pro-indy party to stand democratically for election like any other and take seats from Unionists (as long as the SNP hold power in the devolved administration, of course).

Other SNP activists, meanwhile, are already openly trying to dig dirt and undermine the women leading the new party, which is only planning to contest list seats and therefore poses no threat to the SNP whatsoever. Does anyone still think the current SNP care about independence, rather than power?

Scotland’s media is still unable to contain its outpouring of bitter, resentful rage over Alex Salmond’s exoneration by a jury on trumped-up sexual assault charges.

Flailing blindly in all directions it’s achieving little other than to embarrass itself, such as last night when Scotland On Sunday had to change its front page in a late panic. But the media’s toxic fury at being denied Salmond’s head on a pole has also led it to do something far, far more serious and reckless.

And every one of them knows exactly what they’ve done.

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Yesterday we posted an article noting that hardline trans-rights extremists, among whose number we must regretfully count the Scottish Government, were engaged in a determined and alarmingly successful attempt to abolish the scientific basis for reality.

We did not expect such a striking illustration of that assertion to arrive this soon.

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We all remember this happy time, right?

Of course, it didn’t work out like that in practice.

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It doesn’t happen often, but it has today. Because Nick Robinson said this:

You know, Nick Robinson. It was Nick Robinson who just complained about someone misleadingly editing an interview to make it look as though someone hadn’t answered a question. Seriously, the actual Nick Robinson.

We’ve got nothing, folks.

So the Supreme Court has delivered its brutal verdict. The prorogation of Parliament was completely unlawful and now, in effect, never happened. Parliament is officially still in session. The same Parliament that has stupendously failed to solve Brexit for three years can reconvene and continue to fail to solve it. What now?

Jeremy Corbyn stood up a few minutes ago at the Labour conference and demanded that Boris Johnson stand down immediately and hold a general election, as did several other opposition leaders. Which, alert readers may recall, is what Johnson tried to do, twice, barely a fortnight ago, and was blocked by the opposition.

Presumably if he tries again, they all now have to cooperate and vote for it, even though the dissolution of Parliament would render the Benn bill requiring him to ask the EU for an extension first null and void. So there’ll be a general election held on the subject of “Who rules the country – the people or the courts?”, which is what Johnson wanted all along. Um, victory?

.

PS Fun trivia fact: UK electoral law requires 25 working days between the dissolution of Parliament and the date of a general election. There are exactly 27 working days (inclusive) between now and 31 October.

These are the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe-left grouping in the USA with around 60,000 members (or roughly 10 times as many as the Scottish Greens, though per capita closer to the SSP or RISE), at their conference a couple of days ago.

It’s our most fervent wish that one day the left will grasp the fact that this isn’t how you win a war.

It’s also our most abiding fear that this – with its stern admonitions against clapping, or banner-waving, or speaking to anyone who might disagree with you, or taking “fun shortcuts” or wearing “aggressive scents”, in case any of those things cause trauma to the sensitive – might as well be the SNP conference of 2022.

Let’s not blow independence in this Parliament, eh folks?

We’ve just received the verdict in the hearing over costs in our court case against Kezia Dugdale, and it’s an incomprehensible one. The sheriff has awarded costs in full to Dugdale, plus a 50% “uplift” mainly on the grounds of the “complexity” of the case, despite Dugdale having employed the services of perhaps Scotland’s highest-paid specialist defamation QC.

Full costs were awarded despite the sheriff having found that the core complaint on which the case was brought – namely that Dugdale had unjustly defamed me with a damaging and wholly false claim that I was a homophobe – was in fact wholly upheld, and that I had indeed been so defamed.

No explanation was given with regard to the supposed complexities from which the uplift arose. The case was in fact a quite straightforward one in defamation terms: an allegation was made, no supporting facts were provided for it and it was found to be entirely false, but the defender was excused liability on the grounds of honest belief – despite being unable to provide the sheriff with any rational basis for that belief.

That’s just about the bare minimum of complexity that could ever possibly exist in a defamation case, and readers might understandably feel that it ought to have been well within the normal skill set of the defender’s representatives, particularly given that the document comprising the entire core of the case was a single tweet of less than 140 characters.

Apparently if you’re a lawyer who’s been paid tens of thousands of pounds to debate a single tweet you also deserve a 50% bonus by way of extra compensation for all the stress and trauma of, um, doing your normal job.

Kezia Dugdale at no point before, during or after the case apologised for or withdrew her remarks – indeed, after our initial complaint she repeated and expanded them, leaving us with no remedy but to pursue the matter in court, and to compete as best we could with the astronomical sums spent on Dugdale’s defence by external parties and approved by the court even though the sum being sued for was relatively modest.

We don’t yet have a final bill, but we expect it to be in the rough vicinity of £100,000 as previously advised. We’ve already polled readers on their desired response in that event, and received an overwhelming majority of 9:1 in favour of filing an appeal against the substantive judgement on the case.

(The verdict on expenses cannot in practice be appealed itself, but were a substantive appeal to be successful the expenses verdict would automatically be overturned.)

We intend to carry out that decision, but any further views are welcomed.

You’re going to need to before you watch today’s episode of The Jeremy Vine Show, featuring Paul Burrell (who used to be a royal butler about 20 years ago and somehow is now a political commentator), Nicola McLean (who used to get her surgically-altered breasts out for tabloid newspapers around the same time and then went on a reality show for halfwits with no actual talents), and Carole Malone, who we assume is some sort of live public-safety-information warning about the dangers of overdoing HRT.

Vine watches the unfolding horror with the expression of a man absolutely convinced he’s going to be murdered the next time he comes to Scotland. The most painful part is probably just after (Scottish) co-host and former weathergirl Storm Huntley (no, really) helpfully pipes up to suggest “shortbread, tartan… bagpipes” as Scotland’s economic foundations, at which point Jeremy turns in last-ditch desperation to the audience to save him from this slow-motion trainwreck and… well, you’ll see how that goes.

When the second indyref comes along, whenever the Yes campaign has a political broadcast slot on TV, we suggest just putting this on every time.