In the dying days of World War 2, as Berlin crumbled to rubble under Russian bombs and rockets, the Nazis played a desperate last card in the shape of the Volkssturm, an ad hoc fighting force primarily comprised of old men, invalided veterans and those not deemed fit for normal military service. (As most of those were already dead.)
They were rounded up and sent off to the front (usually only a few hundred yards away) in their civilian clothes, armed with whatever odds and sods of weaponry could be scrabbled together – most commonly the one-shot Panzerfaust anti-tank grenade, as seen in the pic above – and invariably slaughtered in the streets by the disbelieving battalions of the Red Army, because it didn’t matter to Hitler whether they lived or died.
So there it is. In a massive, humiliating and abrupt reverse, the Scottish Greens have announced that they’ll support the Scottish Government – still led for the foreseeable future by Humza Yousaf – in this week’s confidence motion.
Shockingly enough, the debate about the Greens’ principles, intellectual consistency and integrity was an extremely brief one. Faced with the loss of their relevance and influence, they crumbled like month-old carrot cake and rushed their cards onto the table before the SNP had time to do any thinking.
Any hope Kate Forbes might have had of leading the SNP just evaporated, and so did any hope of grown-up government between now and 2026. The SNP will now spend the next two years as pathetic, grovelling puppets, doing whatever the Greens want as long as the paycheques and pension contributions keep rolling in.
It’s a tragic demise for a party that just a couple of years ago still crushed all before it in Scottish politics. But that’s showbiz, folks.
We don’t really have very much to add to our analysis of yesterday. Sunday’s papers and politics shows have just confirmed our view of where things stand.
But for those whose heads are spinning, let’s see if we can make it simpler.
It’s probably as good an illustration of the madness currently engulfing Scottish politics as anything that the most unusual suspect, Anas Sarwar, may have just – temporarily at least – saved Humza Yousaf’s job.
And although our head hurts already, we’ll try to explain why.
We’ll make this short, because we’ve had a long day. Wings is told by a very reliable source that there’s ANOTHER emergency Cabinet meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning, which at least means we get to use this image now.
News reaches Wings this evening that Humza Yousaf has called an emergency meeting of the Scottish Cabinet at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, just a couple of hours before FMQs. (This information has been confirmed directly to us by a source very close to a member of said Cabinet.)
An emergency Cabinet meeting is an extraordinarily rare event. As far as we’re able to establish there have only been two during the SNP’s time in power – when the budget failed to pass in 2009 and Alex Salmond’s administration had to decide whether or not to trigger a general election, and one the day after the Brexit vote to supposedly plan a second indyref (LOL). But in any case they’re extremely unusual.
The subject of the meeting has not been disclosed to us. It could, for example, concern imminent developments in Operation Branchform, or it could relate to the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. The men in grey kilts may have come for the FM. Or Scotland could be about to declare war on Morocco or something. But we are told that the fact of the meeting taking place is a 100% certainty.
So no sleeping in tomorrow, readers. It’s probably going to be big.
