Our sinister network of shadowy agents informs us that the document below has just been sent by Murray Foote to all SNP Parliamentarians. (Click to enlarge.)
It would appear that the SNP is feeling some heat.
The SNP is now almost entirely incapable of telling the truth.
Let’s just check the above by way of example.
At this point you really just have to laugh.
The Lord Advocate’s reference to the Supreme Court was filed on 28 June 22. The court delivered its judgement unexpectedly early on 23 November, but that still gave the SNP five months to plan for the various possible outcomes and be ready to spring into action. But perhaps Nicola Sturgeon misunderstood. She’s just announced that the party won’t even talk about it until another four months after that – in other words, no action until spring.
Is there any point in us even observing how pathetic that is? Should we waste our breath noting what a contemptuous pantomime is being performed here by the Widow Twankies running the party? Can we be bothered mocking the idea that this is some sort of “emergency” response? For Heaven’s sake, even NHS Scotland ambulances arrive quicker than that.
SNP members, of course, have shown time and time again that they’re happy to be fed even the oldest, rottenest carrots by the First Minister, so we won’t hold our breath waiting for them to muster a scrap of anger over this painfully blatant insult to their intelligence, loyalty and commitment. After all, it’s not like they were ever going to be given any meaningful influence over the eventual decision anyway.
(Sturgeon has already made absolutely clear that a UK general election in 2024 is the only option she’s willing to consider, and there is only one authority in her new SNP.)
But good grief, readers. Good grief.
Boris Johnson infamously once hid in a fridge to avoid any awkward questions. Nicola Sturgeon prefers a different kind of small rectangular space, but it’s the same move.
Well done to the Times for attempting to ask one of the obvious questions arising from the events – do the Murrells have a joint bank account? – and we hope someone will ask the others soon. (Why such a specific amount? Why hasn’t it all been paid back yet if it was just a June-2021 cash-flow matter? Why can the Times STILL not credit where they pinched the story from?)
But it wasn’t the only thing the SNP ran scared from today.
The National must have been enormously proud when it successfully fought off all the other newspapers to secure this stunning exclusive today.
We must admit, when we had a good look in the “Pete Wishart Victories” section of our extensive archives we drew a blank. So we were excited to read on and find out.
From tomorrow’s Herald.
We’re calling it now, folks. The SNP will not conduct the next general election as a de facto referendum. There’s a reason they’re stalling. They know they’re going to have to let you down gently. The softening-up starts here.
There has of course been a lot of chat since last night about the latest Ipsos Mori poll putting independence on 56%, with the usual suspects getting over-excited.
It remains to be seen whether the figures represent a short blip of anger over the Supreme Court decision, a more sustained but still temporary period of Yes support like that of summer 2020 – spring 2021, or a permanent shift in public opinion.
So as such they’re actually relatively uninteresting, although the SNP’s plan to do absolutely nothing to take advantage of any momentum that might exist, and to wait several months before even having a strategy conference, remains disturbing.
But what actually caught our eye about the poll were a couple of questions nobody else has reported on.
Can this really be six and a half years ago?
We suddenly feel very old.
Word reaches us, readers, that Nicola Sturgeon was “furious” when she joined the most recent meeting of the SNP’s Westminster group by Skype. Her rage was driven by the suggestion that the party should trigger a Holyrood election to act as a de facto independence referendum, a policy we’re reliably told is supported by a number of MPs who are too scared of being browbeaten by Sturgeon in front of their colleagues to actually speak out in favour of it.
(We won’t mention their names at this point.)
Our source mentioned to us that they seemed to remember an interview in which the First Minister had revealed a possible reason for her extreme antipathy to the idea – one for the BBC’s extensive and rather good three-part documentary “Yes/No – Inside The Indyref”, which was broadcast in August 2019 and never seen again.
It’s not available on iPlayer or YouTube, but fortunately we happened to still have the show recorded on our Sky+ box, so we went to check, and lo and behold our source’s recollection was correct. Apologies for the slightly wonky quality of this video, as we had to record it off the TV screen.
We’ve transcribed it below.
It’s more than two years now since we published this article, but it’s worth quickly going over it again, because there’s nothing on Earth more tedious than boneheads on social media going “Oh, you slag off the SNP but what’s YOUR plan if you’re so clever?”, who haven’t bothered to read any of the dozen times we’ve already answered that question since 25 months ago.
This is it. This is our plan. Try listening this time, thickos.
The SNP are impotent, fearful, useless and liars.
As someone said long ago: “He either fears his fate too much/Or his deserts are small/That puts it not unto the touch/To win or lose it all.”
We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.
By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.
He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.
(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)
So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.
And yet here we are.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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