SNP MP Joanna Cherry posted a series of tweets this morning.
She hasn’t asked us to, but they deserve some amplifying.
On Sunday we told you about Mridul Wadhwa, a man who deceived his way into a job at a rape crisis centre and now wants to be an SNP MSP, in a seat where the party supposedly has an all-woman shortlist. The story was picked up today by the Times.
But Wadhwa isn’t the only man trying to muscle in on a woman-only shortlist.
The weekend just past saw a convulsion as big as any we can ever recall witnessing on Yes social media, triggered by a series of tweets by Nicola Sturgeon which caused an extraordinary negative reaction out of all proportion to their ostensible content.
The reason was that the First Minister – who had remained silent about countless episodes of hideous misogynistic abuse aimed from her own side at MPs and MSPs like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry – had chosen to suddenly leap into action in defence of the toxically divisive horror that is Glasgow councillor Rhiannon Spear after Spear had been widely criticised for making blatantly false claims in a video promoting her attempt to be selected as the candidate for Argyll & Bute.
(Sturgeon had no such public condemnation for the torrents of abuse the SNP Twitler Youth then unleased on Kirsten Thornton, the female SNP activist and Generation Yes founder who’d pointed out Spear’s untruths.)
The move sent the party’s woke and sane factions into a frenzy of bloodletting which in itself will have little if any impact on the wider electorate, but nonetheless threw into sharp relief the life-and-death battle currently going on for the SNP’s soul.
And since that’s related to what we’ve been writing about on Wings for the bulk of this year, it seemed worthwhile to get some things down on the record once and for all.
There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about the SNP NEC, the rather secretive body that controls the operation of the party (and therefore also in effect the Scottish Government).
Extraordinarily, even if you’re a party member there’s no way to access a full list of the 42-member committee – something which for pretty obvious reasons of basic political transparency and accountability ought to be recorded prominently on the SNP website, let alone available to rank-and-file members.
(Ordinary party members aren’t even permitted to see the minutes of NEC meetings, which are restricted to NEC members.)
So we got our investigating hats on.
It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.
Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.
To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.
SNP MSP James Dornan is someone Wings always had a lot of time for, at least until his shameful and central role in the stitch-up of Mark McDonald – an act which was the foundation stone for all of the party’s subsequent chicanery. We can only speculate as to his motivations for doing so, and their connection or otherwise to a certain deranged and ambitious fantasist in his close circle.
But as anyone who’s watched The Usual Suspects (or GoodFellas, or pretty much any classic-era Bond movie) will tell you, the real villains have a nasty habit, once they’ve achieved their goals, of “tidying up” anyone who might link them to their misdeeds – especially if those people don’t fit the ideal of their brave new worlds.
So an old, straight, white, working-class male like James Dornan, who signed the SNP Women’s Pledge, was always likely to find himself propping up a motorway flyover at some point sooner or later, and thus it has proved.
One week out from a general election, the SNP are busy purging the “problematic”, as seen in this footage captured by a terrified bystander tonight somewhere in Fife.
The latest victim of the Waffen YSI, the party’s ultra-pious “woke” youth battalion, is Denise Findlay, a recently-elected member of the party’s Conduct Committee. She was targeted because she’s a gender-critical feminist opposed to the transgender cult which exerts a wildly disproportionate influence in the SNP upper echelons, supported enthusiastically by the First Minister.
She follows on the heels of Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath candidate Neale Hanvey, who last week was suspended from the party – without even a hearing – on a ludicrously trumped-up charge of “anti-Semitism” dredged up by SNP woke youth, namely that three-and-a-half years ago he shared an article (written by someone else) about billionaire financier George Soros and money-laundering, which at no point mentioned either Israel or Jewish people, even obliquely.
This led to the extraordinary farce of the SNP leader not only withdrawing all support and party funds, but publicly ordering party members not to campaign for Hanvey, in the near-certain knowledge that this would gift the seat to a Unionist party (it’s currently held, by fewer than 300 votes, by hapless Labour idiot and shadow Scottish Secretary, Lesley Laird).
Hanvey, like Findlay, was brought down not by political opponents or the media but by members of his own party, as punishment for signing the SNP Women’s Pledge.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
