wings over scotland | The return of fear – News Block

Wings readers are, of course, the last people in the country who need a reminder of the ditch-slithering creature that is Scottish Labor activist Duncan Hothersall. And, in truth, by their standards, these tweets are only mildly despicable.

But it’s what they don’t say that’s remarkable.

Salmond’s casual dismissal being fully acquitted by a jury on each charge after one of the most intense and far-reaching investigations in Scottish legal history, it remains, of course, alarming in its sarcastic undermining of due process of law. The characterization of the facts as “rape trial” – Salmond was not charged with rape – he is no more dishonest than the usual Hothersall modus operandibut no less despicable.

The attempt to criminalize through innuendo someone being a tactile person (we all know people who will hug you as soon as they look at you, but also others for whom a formal handshake remains uncomfortably familiar) is simply typical of Hothersall’s penchant for smearing over coherent arguments. Neither be tactile nor have “sexual contact” are somehow illegal or even improper. We are all here on Earth, after all, as a result of sexual contact.

And the basic factual inaccuracy: as far as we can remember, Salmond only acknowledged a single instance of fully pampered, fully clothed but vaguely intimate contact with one of the complainants, not two, is quite par for the Hothersall course.

What is telling, of course, is the extent to which the mere sight or thought of Alex Salmond still convulses unionists with utter terror.

It is true that it is increasingly difficult to watch any newscast or look at political social networks without seeing the happy face of the leader of Alba. With recent appearances on Question Time (BBC1), Debate Night (BBC Scotland), Any Questions (Radio 4) and Sky News, countless appearances on the smaller news channels, his terrific new online show and what will no doubt be a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Salmond is almost as much a fixture on people’s screens as he was during the indyref, and he’s in an effervescent and incisive way.

(Incidentally, the quality of the celebrity chasers Salmond has been able to call upon for his Fringe show is astonishing, and even more so when compared to the ranks of, to be generous, D-listers like Janey Godley, Alan Cumming, Val McDermid, and, um, Susie McCabe, with whom his successor slinks away.)

The ex-FM is also somehow finding the time to take the Wee Alba Book roadshow to every town and village in Scotland, directly reaching tens of thousands of voters, while the SNP hides in stage-run members-only events and demands £40 from “conference” attendees to listen to speeches without the right to speak or vote.

Alba, in fact, is now the de facto he led the independence party campaign in Scotland, partly because he is working diligently in politics, but also simply because no one else is really doing anything. The SNP/Green administration is completely focused on making every possible aspect of workers’ lives miserable and unaffordable with its relentless nanny state meddling, and has openly abandoned any genuine ambition to achieve independence.

It is therefore not surprising that unionists, like the career devolutionists now in charge of the SNP, are horrified at the prospect of Salmond returning, like Rasputin, of which they were sure. this time It was his grisly end.

?

Because they know that while Alba is still a minor fringe party in the polls, what really matters are the politicians who are capable of making the political climate, not just reacting to it. (This might be an opportune point to remember that Brexit, the biggest political change in Britain in the last 50 years, was brought about mainly by a man who has never been elected to anything in his life.)

On that scale, Alex Salmond is a Category 5 hurricane, and with the indy leadership stage essentially vacant, it’s no wonder that the enemies of independence are once again running into their musty, dank basements in mounting panic.