Wings Over Scotland

Can you spot the subtle change between these two National stories, readers?

Now, as they’re both in The National the standard of journalism is obviously completely dreadful, and so neither of them actually explains their headline. Nobody is named or quoted even anonymously, and there’s no elaboration other than that “[a member of] the NEC appeared to halt any proposal to use the next General Election as a proxy constitutional vote”, with no indication of HOW they “appeared” to do that.

But they DO raise the question of where on Earth – whoever becomes its new leader – the SNP goes from the smouldering bomb crater that Nicola Sturgeon has left it in.

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The SNP constitution states that a leadership election should take place over a period of four and a half months. Having not had one in almost 20 years, the SNP are now to conduct one from start to finish in the space of four and a half weeks.

The voting period of two weeks (who needs two weeks to vote after three weeks of debate?) means that it’ll be over just a week too late for the party to be able to hold its “special democracy conference” to determine its independence strategy for the next couple of years, but also that the new leader will be in place just in time to file a legal challenge over the Gender Recognition Reform bill before the April deadline.

(Something the party president Mike Russell publicly called for today, in an apparent attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Indeed, he called for candidates not to go back on ANY of the outgoing leader’s policies, which rather invites the question of why they should bother electing a new leader at all.)

Isn’t that convenient, readers?

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

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

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Firstly, some of you owe us money.

But much more importantly, why now?

Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland’s press this morning that despite her weariness, she could have managed a few more months or even a year as First Minister, which would at least have got her halfway to keeping her promise to serve a full term if she was elected in 2021.

Which just makes her timing all the harder to explain.

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Last night we tweeted this:

We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.

As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.

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We’ve just had the results back from some very interesting new polling, and the first snippet is a particularly instructive one.

When challenged on questions of gender, the reflex response of politicians of most parties in the Scottish Parliament is to bang on about how overwhelmingly MSPs voted for the Gender Recognition Reform bill.

Curiously, so far no journalist has bothered to ask whether they care that according to every poll, they’re utterly failing to represent the views of their constituents on the subject – which is, after all, what they’re supposed to be there for.

So we just asked directly if people felt their MSPs were doing their jobs.

Ouch. By well over 2 to 1, respondents felt that they were being let down by the people who are supposed to speak for them. (Excluding DKs the margin is just shy of 70/30, very similar to the margin by which people in polls oppose self-ID generally.)

But it’s when you drill down into the detail that it gets a bit disturbing.

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There are terms beloved of politics activists and commonly used on social media which are a baffling mystery to the general public. We’ve spoken several times of the word “gaslighting”, which is understandably used as shorthand for quite a complex thing that’s difficult to describe concisely, but nevertheless acts as a barrier to understanding for anyone not overly political.

Today’s lesson is the term “DARVO”, and stars the Scottish Greens’ favourite rapist.

Let’s quickly see how it works.

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It might not look like much. But this, readers, is the moment of truth.

Because what you see above is the reckoning Nicola Sturgeon can’t run from.

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Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:

Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.

Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.

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The press watchdog IPSO, which is responsible for the language used by the media with regard to transgender issues, is reviewing its policies.

We urge readers to participate in the consultation.

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Well, it’s hardly before time.

But isn’t that the Scottish Greens co-leader in that picture, in the bunnet, between his colleague Ross Greer and Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, all enthusiastically clapping Douglas just a few weeks ago?

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Some sage advice from one of your elected representatives.

Let’s all be careful out there, folks.