Wings Over Scotland

We were going to write something today for the anniversary of Alex Salmond’s tragic death, but then we read Kevin McKenna’s piece in today’s Herald On Sunday and we can’t improve on it, so go and have a read of that before you do anything else.

Alex always believed in looking forward, not back, so we doubt he’d be overly fussed at the pathetic “tribute” paid to him at the SNP conference this morning. What would undoubtedly have exercised him a lot more would have been the wretched current state of the party he loved and built from almost nothing into the dominant force in Scottish politics.

And nothing typifies that wretched state better than the craven and gutless capitulation of a speech given by Tommy Sheppard yesterday, opposing the rebel amendments to John Swinney’s non-strategy on independence.

It said a lot more than he thought it did, but none of it good.

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It’s really very hard to overstate what mendacious, duplicitous shite this is.

It did its job, though. As expected, the SNP conference comprehensively voted down the rebel amendments to Swinney’s motion on independence “strategy” and backed his grand plan of winning a majority, begging Keir Starmer for a second referendum – just like Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf had done before him with Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – and then scuttling obediently away with his tail between his legs when Starmer told him to get lost.

(At one point he even boasted that he had a brilliant secret plan that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about, making us almost nostalgic for when Sturgeon used to say the same thing and some people actually believed her.)

One bit of the speech did catch our attention, though.

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The SNP conference opened today with Stephen Flynn (primary interest: the career of Stephen Flynn), Karen Adam (primary interest: any shiny or jangly object) and Susan Aitken (primary interest: MOAR PIES), which ought to be more than enough by itself to convincingly illustrate that these are not serious people.

But if you somehow still weren’t certain, there’s this:

That, readers – from Flynn, supposedly the party’s sharpest talent – is political strategising on the level of a football manager wearing his lucky underpants for a cup tie. David Cameron didn’t grant the 2014 referendum because he HAD to, he did it because he saw a political opportunity to kill off independence for decades by delivering a strong victory for the Union.

In the end he got away with the gamble, much more narrowly than he expected to, and no UK Prime Minister will make that mistake again. (Especially as Cameron foolishly DID follow it up with a repeat performance, over Brexit, and this time lost the vote and ended his political career.)

What’s embarrassing is not that Swinney and Flynn are publicly endorsing such an absolute joke of a “strategy”, but that they know it’ll be enough to see the SNP returned to government, where the strategy will fail (whether by not securing the majority or by doing so and having Keir Starmer briskly tell them to sod off), and they can safely trouser fat Holyrood salaries for another half-decade with all the pressure off.

But what if conference delivers a surprise defeat for the leadership during this afternoon’s debate? We don’t expect it to – conference is stuffed with the payroll vote these days, and holding it in Aberdeen yet again has made it as hard as possible for rebels to turn up en masse, short of booking a leaky bothy near Dounreay – but let’s allow it as a possibility just for the sake of argument.

What happens then?

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We’ll be honest, readers, we’ve spent most of the last five days sorting out our iPod music library. It’s a task that would make Hercules wince. 2,700 tracks infested with title case and all sorts of other grammatical catastrophes by crappy algorithms (there are songs on there categorised as being by variously “Adam And The Ants”, “Adam & The Ants” and “Adam and The Ants”, FFS), incorrect attributions and missing artwork.

That involved dealing with (shudder) iTunes, the worst piece of computer software ever written by humans – at least until its replacements, Apple Music and Apple Devices, which we had to switch to when halfway through the process, iTunes simply stopped recognising music at all.

(As far as we can tell, it’s now exclusively for managing podcasts.)

We could easily pen you 2000 pretty spicy words on the hundreds of different reasons why everyone who’s ever contributed to the creation of these monstrously dreadful, hateful apps should be thrown into a sewer full of rabid scorpions, and the main reason we’d do that – other than saving ourselves a fortune on therapy – is that it’d still be more interesting than writing about this complete and utter pishdrivel.

The only notable thing about the hilariously pompous “memorandum of understanding” that these two collections of shameless grifters signed up to at the weekend is that The National managed to find a couple of pages of space in its Sunday issue for it, since it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Palestine.

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It’d be quite hard to find an image that more completely summed up the wretched state of the SNP in 2025 than this one. Look at that tiny handful of miserable faces, sitting dejectedly around a near-empty function room. It’s so bleak Mike Leigh could make an entire movie out of it.

And we know what you’re thinking – that we sat through some internet livestream to find the most pitiful-looking freezeframe imaginable to show them in a bad light. But nope. Kevin Stewart MSP posted this cheery snapshot of his own free will on Twitter on Sunday morning, presumably in the hope of boosting party morale in some way.

Because things really are grim.

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You know something’s shifty when a news account disables replies.

So let’s just have a quick investigate.

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We’ve written a number of extremely, painstakingly detailed articles in the last few months explaining why list votes for the SNP at next year’s election will be wasted, and will serve only to elect Unionist (and in particular Reform) MSPs.

Unfortunately, some people still don’t get it.

And that’s understandable, because super-detailed articles are long and people have terribly short attention spans nowadays, especially if there are large tranches of fiddly arithmetic involved. So let’s go the opposite way.

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There’s an interesting piece in the Sunday Times today.

They’re not the only ones.

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Don’t you know there’s no oil left there anyway?

(Apologies for our impromptu week off, we’ve been very busy with other stuff and there was nothing happening in Scottish politics anyway. See you on Monday.)

I spent yesterday trying to work out exactly why I was so depressed about the fatal shooting of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk.

It wasn’t because I shared many of his opinions – other than opposition to gender ideology and DEI, and (surprisingly) support for Scottish independence, we had little in common. And it wasn’t general sadness about such a young man (31), a husband and a father to two preschool children, being so brutally slain. Because over 50 people are murdered every single day in the US alone and everyone just shrugs.

Nor was it even the fact that his death was captured in all its shocking, bloody horror on video, and inescapable on social media, nor that it came just the day after footage broke of another appalling killing in the States, the unprovoked stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic who’d been released on no-fee bail despite 14 previous arrests and should never have been at large.

Nor was it the grimly predictable emergence of the fact that Kirk’s shooter appears to have been a transactivist – America’s fastest-growing murderer demographic.

In the end, the most chilling thing about this particular crime is this: Charlie Kirk was killed for doing exactly what civilised people are supposed to do.

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Last week we introduced readers to Sophia “Tarquin” Brooks, the 18-year-old boy who Graham Linehan is currently on trial for supposedly “assaulting”, and in particular his connection to disgraced former policeman and serial harasser Lynsay Watson.

(From reporting of the proceedings at Westminster Magistrates Court, it sounds very much like Watson has been directing and influencing Tarquin’s complaints to the police – which had originally been dismissed as baseless – and was largely responsible for the matter getting to trial.)

But Watson isn’t the only middle-aged trans-identifying man with whom “Tarquin” has a seemingly close relationship when it comes to the relentless, vindictive persecution of people who believe in biological sex.

We think (but haven’t been able to verify) that that’s Watson on the left of the thumbnail of the above video, in the facemask and with a brown bag amid extraordinary scenes as Tarquin left the court after giving his evidence.

But the burly, blond bespectacled man at the centre of it, who appears to be acting as some sort of official representative for “Tarquin”, is Stephanie Hayden – born Anthony Halliday, who changed his name in 2005 to Steven Hayden shortly after being released from the Sex Offenders Register (more on that below) before obtaining a GRC in the name of “Stephanie” in 2017.

Hayden is a convicted paedophile and self-described lawyer who, like Lynsay Watson, dedicates his entire life to the persecution of gender-critical campaigners.

And as remarkable as it might seem to anyone who read our previous piece, Hayden may be the more toxic of the two.

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We’ve written already about the magnitude of the error transactivists have made in bringing about the arrest of Graham Linehan on trumped-up incitement charges. But thanks to the excellent work of court reporter Nick Wallis this week, the sheer scale of it is still only beginning to unfold.

At its heart is a scarcely-believable tale about how a tiny handful of deeply mentally ill men – at the core, just three – have for years orchestrated a campaign of vindictive, hateful intimidation and terror which has caused untold suffering to individuals, done catastrophic damage to the reputation of the police, and cost the taxpayer millions of pounds, all in a desperate attempt to validate their own delusions.

It’s going to be no small task to summarise it for you. But let’s do our best.

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