Wings Over Scotland

6 November 2024 was a normal sitting day in the Scottish Parliament, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Nicola Sturgeon spent the previous evening in London, watching a special screening of a dreadful BBC Three sitcom about – of course – drag queens.

But remarkably, though she must have been puffy-eyed and weary, the 6th was one of the few days when she did actually manage to turn up at Holyrood to do her job.

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So things are getting pretty strange.

Polling in Scotland, the UK and Wales in the last few days has shown Great Britain taking a fairly heavy swerve to the right after just five months of Sir Keir Starmer’s government. Labour now lead Reform (who have five seats to Labour’s 411) by just three points in the UK and are even more remarkably now in THIRD place in Wales, a country where the party has won every single election for over 100 years.

Scotland, meanwhile, is heading for a hung Parliament in 2026 in which – as this site has been telling its readers for the last year and a half – the only possibility of a stable administration will be an SNP-Labour coalition.

We live, as they say, in interesting times.

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The proceedings at the Supreme Court this week were a tough follow even if you could get the court’s abominably bad livestream to work. They’re all archived here now, but non-lawyers will probably glaze over quickly during the nine hours of intense legalese.

We’re not allowed to clip up any illustrative sections, on pain of possible contempt of court, so perhaps the best way to explain the key parts of what happened in a vaguely comprehensible way is by showing you some commentary from social media.

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Credit where it’s due:

17 months is the quickest she’s ever caught up with us.

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The Scottish Government has finally, and reluctantly, published its submission for next week’s crucial Supreme Court hearing on the definition of the word “woman”.

Many expert observers have already noted that the document flatly contradicts the Scottish Government’s previous repeated and strenuous assertions that a Gender Recognition Certificate confers “no new rights” on trans people, and have published extremely detailed assessments which are frankly all but impenetrable to non-lawyers but basically conclude that the Scottish Government’s position is a mess.

Our favourite line, however, is this one.

So if you’re obliged to have a 50/50 sex balance in your boardroom, you can do it by hiring a man with a GRC saying he’s legally female, or by hiring a woman.

We believe that the young folk nowadays call that a “self-own”.

You’ve got to admit, that’s a zinger.

Craig Whyte is a man who knows all about financial doom looming on the horizon of a once-powerful institution. But it doesn’t take an expert with lived experience to spot what’s coming down the line for the SNP.

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As a lifelong political geek and former SNP and Alba Party member, I’ve spent years supporting Scotland’s independence movement. However, over the last few years, I’ve watched the campaign (as opposed to support for independence) wither away. Being a Scottish nationalist has become increasingly disheartening, like watching someone you love succumb to a slow, debilitating illness. In frustration, I switched off from my homeland and turned my focus to the drama of US politics.

Over the last three years I immersed myself in it, watching both left and right-wing outlets. I became so hooked and invested that I jumped on a plane to Washington DC for the 2024 election. I canvassed with DC Democrats in rural Pennsylvania (that’s me third from the left in the pic below), attended Kamala Harris’s concession rally, and went to Trump’s only watch party in DC.

My journey led me to believe that Scotland’s independence campaign could learn a great deal from Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ failure.

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We’ll give you three guesses as to the highly controversial and extravagantly taxpayer-funded organisation that has its rainbow fingerprints all over this story, readers.

But you’re going to have two to spare.

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So it looks like the USA has elected a mad orange rapist convicted of 34 felonies who could yet be in jail by the time of his inauguration. (He would remain President even if that happened, which would be really funny.) And we can’t even blame them for it, because the alternative they were offered was, remarkably and stupendously, worse.

Wings called it like we called Trump’s first victory (and most other things). We tweeted this last year when thinking about the upcoming election. It’s a variant on something we wrote about on Wings eight and a half years ago. We’re posting it again now in the desperate hope that one day, maybe, far in the future, someone will actually listen.

But, y’know, we’re not holding our breath or anything.

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