Wings Over Scotland

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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We’re important!

Something to look forward to there, then.

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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Last month, when half a football team of armed police ambushed and arrested comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport for a couple of tweets, we said this:

Today, even more swiftly than we thought, this happened:

Rarely can a hand have been overplayed so badly.

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We should point out right at the start that a reader donated £12 back in the summer specifically to send us to Nicola Sturgeon’s book event in Bath last night.

We assume it was someone we’d upset in some way.

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So on the surface level this is just flat-out hilarious.

Firstly because, as we showed you yesterday, the “significant proportion of Scotland’s population” which appears to have been won back to the SNP since John Swinney became its leader is… 1%.

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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 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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