No plans for 'Wings Over Scotland' party says controversial blogger

A controversial blogger and fierce critic of the SNP has said he is no longer considering creating a ‘Wings Over Scotland’ party to compete in Holyrood.

There are no plans for a Wings Over Scotland party.

Stuart Campbell had in 2019 told The Times that he was considering competing at the coming Holyrood elections, but that he no longer can “see the point”.

The party would have been another pro-independence splinter party alongside others such as Independence for Scotland and opposed to some of the SNP’s social policy, including the reforms to the Gender Reform Act.

He had said the plans would only come to fruition if there was a chance Scotland would elect a parliament without a majority for independence as it had done since 2011.

The SNP is also expected to be re-elected with a majority in the Holyrood elections in May.

Mr Campbell told The National: “The Wings party won’t be happening, for all sorts of reasons.

“One of the main ones is that if it had, I wouldn’t have been able to undertake all the investigative journalism Wings has run in recent months about the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, because it would have looked like party politicking.

“But the main one is that I could no longer see a point. I don’t think the problem for independence is going to be lacking a majority at Holyrood.

“The problem is an SNP leadership with no genuine intention of pursuing independence and whatever happened we wouldn’t have been able to fix that.”

Mr Campbell is a deeply divisive figure within the independence movement, but his blog is one of the most read independent political websites in the country.

It also has regular contributions from sittings SNP MPs such as Kenny MacAskill despite its opposition towards the SNP leadership.

In May last year, Twitter moved to ban Mr Campbell's account for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy”.

The social media platform also suspended the account for the prospective party, @WingsPartyScot, in April 2020.

Mr Campbell criticised the decision at the time, labelling it censorship and “deliberate interference in political affairs”.

He also called the social media platform “an unaccountable and unelected foreign corporation serving the interests of a massive right-wing pharmacological lobby".

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