Wings Over Scotland

We were interested to read about this earlier this evening:

Not least because it was the first we’d heard about it. At the time of writing this post we’ve still had no communication from the Standards Commission to alert us to the judgement, which is frankly a bit of a poor show. We might file a complaint with the Standards Commission about it, depending on whether we can be bothered to wait another year and a quarter for the result.

We are of course pleased that the odious Cllr Joji has finally been formally censured for her obnoxious behaviour, but frankly she’s gotten off very lightly.

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Well, there it is.

It’s not like it hasn’t been coming.

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Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.

(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month.)

For around 40 years of my life, I had an easy one-word answer to being asked if I was in favour of independence for Scotland, and that answer was “Yes”. If you’d pushed me to expand, I’d have said “Yes, obviously“.

Even though my dad was employed by the SNP leader of the time – in his non-SNP capacity as a business owner – politics wasn’t discussed in our house. (These were the 1970s, so there wasn’t a vast amount of discussion full stop.) But I was raised, basically by default, with the view that Scotland was a country.

Of course it was a country. It had its own dialect and an identifiable culture, both things personified to my young self by Oor Wullie and The Broons, and our weekly visits to my granny’s wooden bungalow in a wee ancient village near Cumbernauld that may as well have been Auchenshoogle (weirdly, sometimes “Auchentogle”).

It had national football and rugby teams. It had a flag. Why would it be any less of a country than Germany or Italy or Holland or Brazil or Argentina? (My knowledge of geography was primarily World Cup-based.)

So as soon as I had even the vaguest notion of the concept of politics – probably around the age of 7 or 8 – it seemed straightforwardly axiomatic to me that it should be independent. There was never even a thought process, it was just mad and unnatural to think otherwise, like believing the sea was orange. Countries run their own affairs, right? And that was it for the next 40-odd years.

(Post-2007, when I started to seriously examine the idea, the feeling only solidified.)

But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer is different. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.

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Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella.

And not just for the obvious reason.

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Tuesday’s front page headline in The National was roughly the political equivalent of introducing yourself to your new next-door neighbour by saying “Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Jimmy from No.22 and it definitely wasn’t me who killed your cat last night”.

Humza Yousaf’s great masterplan of an independence strategy is imploding faster than the OceanGate Titan, and scarcely any less disastrously. And unless you’re one of the colleagues, family or friends of the tragic victims on board the doomed vessel, it’s even more painful to watch.

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This one goes out to all the “rebel” MSPs at the SNP desks in Holyrood.

Because it’s nearly time for you to choose whether you want to fight, or die meekly.

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Until a few weeks ago Calum Steele was the chief of the Scottish Police Federation, so as due-credits go we particularly appreciate this one.

So let’s remind ourselves of a few things.

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The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.

It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.

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So we finally have two official runners.

And to be honest, we’ve never had an easier decision to make since that time when we caught fire while standing next to the sea.

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When assessing who might be the best choice for the next leader of the SNP, and by extension of the independence movement, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to beware of anyone being bigged up by the Unionist media.

(Not only because they don’t have the SNP or Yes movement’s best interests at heart, but also because these are the people who thought Jim Murphy would take Scottish Labour surging to triumph in 2015 and Kezia Dugdale would win the 2021 election.)

So let’s take a quick look at the runners and riders.

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So here we are, the morning after the morning before.

The thing that had to happen happened. What happens now?

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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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