Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday we noted in passing that independence support now outstrips that of the SNP by more than 20 points, making the party into a gigantic liability as the vehicle for enabling Scots to leave the UK. Put simply, even when voters want independence (as most now do), they’re not willing to vote SNP to get it.

(Not, of course, that they WOULD get it if they voted SNP – the party still having no coherent or credible strategy to achieve it – but more than 40% of would-be Yes voters are no longer prepared to even try giving them the benefit of yet another mandate.)

And since what everyone loves most of all on New Year’s Day is a good old wade in some political stats, we thought we’d take a little more detail on that.

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There’s a post on the superwoke poll-analysis account Ballot Box Scotland today bemoaning the lack of interest in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election from polling companies, and presenting it as some sort of anti-Scottish conspiracy.

The real reason nobody’s very interested, of course, is that as things stand the election is an obvious foregone conclusion in which the party that’s been in power for the previous 19 years will stay in power for another five, and nothing will change.

The only minor intrigue around the election is to be found at the edges and is only of real interest to politics nerds, but since we ARE politics nerds we may as well take a look at it.

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For lack of anything more interesting to write about, we thought we might do a monthly rundown of polling in the leadup to next year’s Holyrood election, with seat projections from a neutral source, in the shape of the newish Devolved Elections website.

And very quickly, things got a bit weird.

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Oh good, another plan. Just three and a half years to wait.

Should we, what’s the phrase, “Save The Date”?

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It’s Wings’ 14th birthday today, and to be entirely honest with you, readers, like a lot of teenagers we’re having a bit of an existential crisis. It’s quite difficult to see any point in being a Scottish political journalist for the next five years, because it’s just going to be one depressing Groundhog Day after another.

So rather than moan on as usual, today we’re handing over to a precocious new talent whose enthusiasm can’t be dimmed. It’s one that garnered a lot of attention this week by delivering a comprehensive and very entertaining spanking to SNP MP and devoted friend of the site Pete “Cosy Feet” Wishart. 

Wishart threw such a petulant strop that he accused a code algorithm of defamation and threatened legal action against the inanimate collection of 1s and 0s.

With skills like that already placing it well beyond the abilities of most of the Scottish political commentariat, we thought we’d give it a tryout and ask it to take a look into the country’s future.

The following article is completely unedited other than a bit of formatting, though we did ask it (with only partial success) to tone down the haggis-and-bagpipes stuff slightly from its first draft. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Grok. Unlike most journos, it provided links and it did write its own headline.

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This really is an extraordinary headline, for multiple reasons.

Because what actually IS “the rise of Reform”?

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Perhaps the key graphic from last night’s by-election in Caerphilly is this one (green means Plaid Cymru in the context of Wales):

In the end, Plaid won pretty comfortably in what had been predicted to be a very tight contest between them and Reform, with a majority of almost 4,000. But Plaid aren’t going to be the next government of the UK, so what’s the real story?

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All of the words you’re about to read below were written by the same person in the last few days. It’s completely verbatim and none of it is taken in any way out of context. It means what it sounds like it means.

But even if you’ve got a forehead the size of the “eggheads” from the famous Tefal ads of the 1980s, you’ll never guess the big reveal at the end.

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Kevin McKenna has a piece in today’s Herald asking the question that is now the core issue for the Scottish independence movement.

The short version of the answer is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled”. But that does nothing to explain the fool’s mindset to us, or help devise a way to get them to accept it.

To some degree that’s because – as we saw so starkly in the “NO DEBATE!” tactics of the gender ideologly cult – part of the problem is that the built-in defence mechanism of the fooled is something George Orwell described in “1984”:

“CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”

What that means in practice is that the fooled never reflect on their own behaviour, far less enter into a meaningful discussion of it. In Orwell’s dystopian Oceania, that was to save them from torture and death at the hands of the Thought Police. More often nowadays, it’s simply to avoid humiliation on social media.

Either way, it’s vanishingly rare to hear someone elaborate on why they’re choosing to remain fooled. Which is why we’re so lucky today.

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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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We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.

Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.

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This is a remarkable thing.

The Scottish Greens, who until last year were a party of government, claim to have 7,600 members. This month they conducted an election to choose two people as their “co-conveners”, from a list of four candidates, and almost 90% of the party’s members decided that they didn’t want any of them.

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