Piling on 156
We must admit, the terrible people that we are, we’ve been enjoying watching today’s extended meltdown by the SNP’s woke faction about last night’s NEC election results. Because it appears their egos are so huge that they’re not even smart enough to play dignified to spoil our schadenfreudish fun. It’s been full-on public tantrums.
But this nonsense needs briefly addressing.
Our Number One Fan 175
Lavish expenses recipient Pete Wishart MP doesn’t want to talk about Wings.
So that’s probably the end of that.
When people tell you who they are 103
Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.
Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.
The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.
These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).
Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.
(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)
We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.
On the other hand 90
Alert readers will probably have noticed that earlier today we featured a post by SNP MP Kenny MacAskill making the seemingly-unsurprising statement that the purpose of his party is to “bring about the end of the British state”.
So we thought he might have wanted to check with his colleague Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokeman and an obsessive Russophobe, when we saw a snide quote from him in a Belfast Telegraph story disparaging former leader Alex Salmond (who’d advocated the reunification of Ireland during a chat with ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern) for the heinous crime of “proposing the disruption of the United Kingdom”.
It later transpired that there’d been an error and the quote should have been (and now is) attributed to a Scottish Conservatives spokesman.
But we couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of shock with which the comment was received on social media in the several hours between its publication and correction, as if nobody thought it at all implausible that McDonald would have said such a thing. (And indeed, it’s barely different from what he HAS said about Salmond’s RT show.) There were plenty harsh criticisms of him, but we didn’t see a single tweet suggesting that a mistake might have been made.
Never more so than in 2020, sometimes fiction is more believable than truth.
Premature chickens 84
We were looking for something else this afternoon, but accidentally found this:
Just two weeks before the last Holyrood election, widely-respected analysts Weber Shandwick had put together a prediction of how the results would pan out. Just for a bit of fun, let’s compare it to the reality.
Wildcat Pete And The Converts 252
Image adjustment 142
We lost a few quid to Graham Linehan at poker this afternoon and we needed a wee bit of cheering up, so God bless the SNP Twitler Youth for coming to our rescue.
Okay, now we’re worried.
Feeling this 95
The misunderstanding 119
There are just under 36 hours until the 2019 general election.
God help us all.
How to tell when Kezia Dugdale is lying 148
Her lips move.
On 21 June 2019 she said this:
But today we learned what happened in July 2019, literally just days later:
Ah, classic Kez.
The contaminant 123
Remember this guy? Go on, give it a minute, it’ll come to you.
He popped up today to chuck in his tuppence-worth about inflammatory language in politics, and how – like everything else bad – it all started with vile cybernats in 2014 (because as you’ll of course remember, it was Yes supporters who never shut up about “surrendering”) and has now sullied even the dignified halls of Westminster.
We wonder how that can have happened.



























