On Tactical Voting

Calton is not generally in favour of tactical voting however he is preparing to make an exception for the Holyrood election next year. He has been helped to this decision by a couple of things.

Firstly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the SNP must be defeated at all costs. If they are not, Scotland will become a police state where only views acceptable to the SNP are allowed and we will also have the continued, divisive agitation for another independence referendum while education, the NHS and the economy are ignored.

Secondly, it is highly likely that the current SNP selection process will result in a bunch of woke candidates made in Nicola Sturgeon's image, in spite of the #dontvotewoke campaign being waged by one faction of the party. This makes it easier for Calton to vote for a woke unionist candidate, if they are the one best placed to defeat the SNP in his constituency. Normally he wouldn't touch woke with a bargepole however needs must.

Lastly, the idea of an anti-nationalist coalition is one whose time has come. The silent majority is silent no longer. George Galloway has stirred things up good and proper and Alliance for Unity will be getting Calton's list vote. The traditional unionist parties are so far showing no sign of entering into any election pacts, preferring to split the vote and let the SNP in as usual, however their voters are starting to think differently. If Alex Salmond or the care home scandal don't bring Sturgeon down, her hubris in expecting another term in office may well do the trick. If Labour, the Tories and the Libdems suffer some collateral damage in the process they have only themselves to blame.

Is the SNP Good for Families?

Nicola Sturgeon is currently claiming that she wants everyone to have a family Christmas but is the SNP good for families in general?

Not if you want to be a stay-at-home Mum. The SNP's policies are all geared around getting women back to work as soon as possible with increased nursery provision. The trouble is, the times don't always suit working Mums and the provision is patchy as it relies heavily on the private sector (and this was before Covid made life even more difficult for nurseries).

Not if you don't want your child to be exposed to pornographic sex education and transgender ideology. The SNP looks with scorn on parents who express concern about these issues, to the extent of calling them bigots for not getting on the woke bandwagon.

Not if you want to raise your children free from state interference. The SNP have abandoned their Named Person legislation due to data sharing concerns however they still believe that the state knows best and parents are not the most important people in a child's life.

Not if you want to choose how you discipline your children - the SNP have now outlawed even the lightest smack and will shortly be criminalising parents, in spite of their promises not to. They are also encouraging children to report their parents. This is state interference in family life on a grand scale and it won't stop with smacking - it will eventually extend to children reporting their parents if they get put on the naughty step, or sent to bed early, or are denied that extra sweetie. Children's rights trump parent's rights in SNP land. That doesn't make for happy families.

Not if you want to have a three-generational Christmas dinner round an actual dinner table - the SNP are warning us to get ready for a "digital Christmas". Calton can't think of anything sadder or more horrible. He also can't think of anything more likely to spark mass civil disobedience!

Not if you want to see an elderly relative in a care home. Having killed off a lot of grandparents by transferring Covid positive people out of hospital into care homes, the SNP are now paranoid and the restrictions around care home visits, not to mention the conditions within care homes, with residents effectively in solitary confinement, are now inhumane for residents and their families.

Not if you want to see your student son or daughter for Christmas. Having bowed to pressure from universities and let students return in September, even although they could have studied from home, the SNP are now faced with the problem of how to let them go home safely after Covid has rampaged through campuses. A problem which could have been foreseen and avoided.

No, the SNP are not good for families.

Is the SNP Good for Women?

 Calton was prompted to write this post after seeing that one hopeful SNP candidate was not approved by the party because of her views on transgender issues and another was asked who would look after her children if she was elected. Both were women. Now, one would think that, with a female leader who claims to be a feminist, the SNP would be a positive environment for women, supportive of their rights and encouraging of their aims. Not so. In her race to be seen as the most woke leader in the western world, Nicola Sturgeon has abandoned her sex. Let's have a look at the evidence.

She claims that her plans to make it easy for men to self-identify as women do not clash with her feminism, however many feminists would disagree. They think, and Calton agrees, that the radical trans ideaology which Sturgeon is pursuing not only threatens women's safe spaces but threatens the very definition of a woman and all the hard-won rights which go with it. The Scottish Government's Gender Reform Act (GRA) may be on the back burner for now but, make no mistake, it will be back with a vengeance if the SNP get a majority in Holyrood next year. The fact that the First Minister has twice invited best friend and minister responsible for the GRA Shirley-Anne Somerville onto her daily briefing in the last fortnight confirms this. It also demonstrates that if you support the GRA, you get the support of the leader of the SNP in your battle to be reselected. If you don't support the GRA, forget it. (Somerville is being targeted by the #dontvotewoke campaign as she tries to hang on to Dunfermline and West Fife.)

Joanna Cherry is another woman who has questioned the party's policy on transgender issues. She wanted to stand for Edinburgh Central next year but the SNP NEC changed the rules, effectively preventing her from doing so. Much has been made of the Salmond/Sturgeon divisions within the SNP but the real faultline is the woke/non-woke one, which has spawned the #dontvotewoke hashtag on twitter, referring to the current selection contests for SNP candidates. It is well known that Stuart Campbell is no fan of Nicola's however his comments on the candidate selection process are still worth reading. Further evidence that the SNP leader is not good for women is the emergence of the SNP Women's Pledge, which would not be needed if Sturgeon truly supported women. They are supporting non-woke candidates.

Calton could say more on issues such as the child-care question posed to a female candidate, how Alex Salmond's sleazy, but not illegal, behaviour was overlooked by senior women in the SNP in order not to damage the cause of independence and how the SNP have shown a complete lack of trust in women's ability to bring up their own children without government intervention (the named persons and smacking legislation) but this post is already long enough. Perhaps another day ...

Policy-making on the High Heel

 If Calton had to pick one thing which demonstrates that Nicola Sturgeon is making it up as she goes along, it would be Thursday's announcement that masks should be worn in work canteens as of Friday but masks in corridors don't need to be worn until Monday. This is not just policy-making on the high heel, it's stupidity on stilts. If masks were required in canteens two days ago, except when eating, why the delay in requiring masks in corridors, which are usually more enclosed than a canteen? It's no surprise that a large part of the population now has no clue what they are supposed to be doing to avoid the spread of Covid. The clear messaging which the First Minister prided herself on has descended into a fog of stupid rules in spite of her continued daily appearances on our TV screens, thanks to the craven BBC.

Scotland has been locked down harder and for longer than England thanks to Sturgeon's fear and it has resulted in no real difference in infections north and south of the border, and yet she continues with her MacBoris approach - simply putting a kilt on what the Prime Minister does. He is not getting it right and neither is she. Lockdowns only work when they are in operation. When they are lifted, the virus continues its merry way. If the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed a temporary lockdown will help. Otherwise it's just ruining the economy, putting people out of work and causing excess deaths through cancer etc for sweet nothing. We are not preventing Covid deaths with the current strategy - we are simply delaying them and causing other deaths in the meantime.

We need to stop kidding ourselves on that we can control this virus and we need to stop looking to a vaccine as a magic bullet. We can't afford to keep paying workers who can't work and businesses who can't open due to government edicts and so the edicts need to stop. We should switch our attention instead to protecting the vulnerable as much as we can while learning to accept that opportunistic infections kill the elderly and vulnerable - always have, always will. If we don't, we will end up with millions unemployed, isolated, lonely, sick and dying from diseases which were preventable, unlike Covid.