A fascinating line from the BBC this evening:
The number of parties who got MSPs elected at the last election is… five. (Though in fairness there are now six, Reform having a single MSP after Graham Simpson defected from the Tories. The Lib Dems are even outnumbered by independents, of whom there are seven.)
When we get bored in the summer silly season, we often start poking around in stats. This week we’d been pondering the complete waste of everyone’s time Anas Sarwar’s four and a half years in charge of Scottish Labour have been, and the open goal he’s missed in failing to capitalise on a period of constant chaos and turmoil for the SNP.
That got us to thinking about which leaders in the Scottish Parliament era have made a significant difference (in either direction) to the fortunes of their parties, and from there it was pretty short work to illustrate it in the form of a graph.
It rather leaps out at you, doesn’t it?
Lacking anything better to do on a grey and cloudy day in Bath, we thought it might be a lark to go through every Holyrood constituency in Scotland and contemplate where it might go in next year’s election, based on the current state of polling.
And just to make things interesting, compared to our last assessment we’re going to give opposition parties the (often considerable) benefit of the doubt in a few seats for the sheer heck of it, and see if there’s any even slightly plausible outcome that means the SNP might win some list seats if all their voters vote for them on both ballots, or if they’ll waste a million votes for nothing and get dozens of Unionists elected like they did in 2021. [SPOILER: don’t prepare yourself for a surprise.]
Warning: despite the quite zingy title this is actually going to be a very dry stats post, readers. It is, on the other hand, based on a man having something disturbingly close to a complete psychotic mental breakdown, so there’s always that for a bit of colour.
Because the paragraph above, and in particular the highlighted part, is without a doubt the most dishonest, diametrically false and wildly extreme lie about Scottish politics that we’ve ever seen anyone tell in the 13.5 years of Wings Over Scotland’s existence.
And folks, that’s a high bar.
Way back in the day, the Lib Dems in particular, but also other parties and the “Better Together” campaign, were infamous for the “dodgy barchart” tactic.
And so degraded is the modern SNP, it’s now scraping the same barrel.
We were very pleased to discover this morning that Johnny Ball is still alive.
But even the man who managed to make maths fun for generations of children would be hard pushed to make sense of the SNP’s membership figures.
We were a little perplexed by this story.
Because, for startlingly obvious reasons, even the SNP hasn’t had the brass neck to do a general fundraiser for this election, with the police’s inquiries still going on into the whereabouts of the cash from their last big appeals.
But in fact the party has managed to wring over £100,000 from the most gullible of its remaining supporters in the days since the election was announced. It’s just been a bit more subtle about it.
BBC Reporting Scotland last night:
Truly, this is the bullshit that just won’t die.
Yesterday was “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, which was the 41st “special” day of 2023 so far for trans people.
(Including but not limited to International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; International Pronouns Day; International Transgender Day Of Visibility; Transgender Awareness Week and of course the whole of “Pride Month”, which is now an almost entirely trans-focused event).
Citizens of Scotland and the UK were solemnly instructed to “remember the many trans people whose lives have been tragically cut short by violence”, although weirdly none of the politicians issuing the orders actually named any.
However, since we’re endlessly being told that trans people are the most marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable members of our society, and that an actual “trans genocide” is currently in progress, we expect there have been loads.
Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.
So let’s see the final scores on the doors.
The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.
It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
