Wings Over Scotland

As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.

In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.

The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.

If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.

Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.

Read the rest of this entry →

15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

Read the rest of this entry →

We had some poll questions out with Panelbase last week. The results were in most ways wholly unsurprising, in line with all previous polls on the subject. Here they are.

Read the rest of this entry →

To: Humza Yousaf (Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care), Shirley-Anne Somerville (Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills) and Clare Haughey (Minister for Children and Young People)

28 April 2022

Dear Mr Yousaf, Ms Somerville and Ms Haughey,

Cass Interim Report: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – Implications for Scotland

Read the rest of this entry →

In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.

It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)

April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.

Read the rest of this entry →

…to all the pathetic, craven, cowardly excuses for politicians in both Scotland and the UK who think that they can blithely keep doing TV interviews and radio call-ins where they dodge the question of what a woman is all the way up to the next election, and thereby knowingly facilitate the criminal mutilation and sterilisation of children and the sexual abuse of vulnerable women in hospitals, prisons and rape refuges.

I am living for the day when someone in the Scottish media finds some courage from somewhere and asks Nicola Sturgeon, because she’s going to blink so fast her face might catch fire. But that phone will just keep on ringing until someone answers.

Just for a little bit of fun. This is actual footage of North Korean TV news (source: NK News), but I thought it deserved a more moving soundtrack.

Just for a little bit of fun. This is actual footage of North Korean TV news (source: NK News) from today, but I thought it deserved a more moving soundtrack.

The trans-sex-role-stereotype movement has put what would have been concealed and kept behind closed doors on centre stage. This is why normal, decent men look aghast at other men’s behaviour while many women sigh with an ‘oh, this again’.

The woke bloke contempt for women is clear and abusive behaviours are on full display. Reading through Lundy Bancroft’s pivotal work “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men”, the full cast of characters is present on Twitter, in the news and in our political parties and institutions.

Read the rest of this entry →

Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?

“At no point, while I was coming to terms with how my [severely disabled] daughter’s future was set to unfold, did I expect to find myself in a position where I would be forced to remind my elected representatives about something as basic as my vulnerable daughter’s need for same-sex care.

Anxieties about her having to endure acts of negligence, or maybe even cruelty, at the hands of an unprofessional person, once I am gone, have haunted some of my sleepless nights. However, I have been consoled with the knowledge that regulations and safeguarding policies would be in place to offer her protection from bad actors.

But what happens when somewhere along the line the differences between the sexes become artificially blurred, and the safeguarding that was in place can no longer be relied upon because of proposed reforms to current law?”

The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse.

We just don’t seem to care.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.

So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.

Read the rest of this entry →

I made the mistake of reading this on the BBC website today.

And I don’t think I’ve ever hated humanity more than I do right now.

Read the rest of this entry →