Wings Over Scotland | Grandpa John’s Nightmare

It’s almost – almost – worth voting SNP in May because of this:

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Because it would be at least momentarily absolutely hilarious watching Swinney try to explain why his “100% guaranteed” second indyref didn’t happen if the SNP actually did get a majority on 30% of the vote (which is narrowly feasible on current polling).

(There would, obviously, be nothing remotely “undemocratic” about the UK government refusing his demand in such circumstances, as it would be speaking for 70% of Scots. You have an iron-clad moral argument if you win more than half the vote, but Swinney himself has decreed that votes for other indy parties don’t count, only the SNP.)

But it still wouldn’t be worth it, because after the chuckles we’d have to endure another five years of the most morally bankrupt Scottish Government of all time.

Even by the standards of the Scottish Parliament of the last decade, yesterday was a shameful day in the chamber. Not only was Angela Constance – with the greatest of irony, the cabinet secretary for justice – saved from the sack by the SNP and Greens, but for good measure one of the few MSPs who ISN’T a disgrace to the Parliament was suspended for two days for calling out the behaviour of perhaps the worst to ever befoul the Holyrood building.

Ash Regan had drawn attention to some truly despicable comments from vile Scottish Greens lunatic Maggie Chapman in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland – comments so bad they’d provoked an incredibly rare public rebuke from the Faculty Of Advocates.

But while Chapman – with the backing of the SNP, of course – was allowed to vote to save herself from any disciplinary sanction, Regan was hauled before the Committee Of Public Safety – whoops, sorry, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee – and punished for daring to tell the Scottish public she serves what she was doing and why.

On the very same day, Tory MSP Roz McCall sent a letter almost identical to Regan’s on the same subject, which she also tweeted, but McCall has – for unexplained reasons – been spared any disciplinary process. Astonishingly and wretchedly, McCall was one of the 84 MSPs who voted to impose the sanction on Regan.

(Angela Constance, who’d been present in the chamber only minutes earlier to face her non-punishment for a double breach of the Ministerial Code, scuttled out of it and back down her hole, neither voting nor abstaining on Regan’s sanction.)

We’ve long since run out of words to describe how embarrassed we are at the state of the Scottish Parliament, once a source of national pride. The naked contempt for even the slightest pretence at justice and fairness signify an institution rotten from top to bottom, with no hope of salvation anywhere on the horizon.

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(Regan, a politician of principle, will almost certainly be voted out in May, whereas Constance will return to the gravy trough and Chapman will probably slither back in too, despite having been rejected by even Green members, because the person who deposed her at the top of the regional list has been suspended amid the party’s bitter tit-for-tat backbiting in the mudfight for lucrative MSP seats.)

If all we have to look forward to in May is another five years of the same ignominious weaselry, it’s time to either force Holyrood to be a grown-up real Parliament, or raze it to the ground. Would that we had an SNP with that much courage, or any at all.