Sturgeon announces use of listening devices to discern popularity

Queen of the North Nicola Sturgeon announced the deployment of high-tech listening devices inside lampposts, road signs and nightclub pillars during a speech in Stirling today, as part of a new strategy to discern whether Scots are really in favour of a second Independence Referendum and if people like her.

The First Minister has opted for a ‘poles over polls’ approach towards the drive for independence by putting bugs in literal poles, and will rebrand her ‘summer initiative’ as an ‘autumn initiative’, while wryly satirising her blood enemy the Conservative Party by utilising their revocation of the Human Rights Act to spy on the people.

In her address within a city that by sheer coincidence is where Scotland scored their biggest military victory over England in 1297, Mrs Sturgeon launched an unprecedented “listening exercise” intended to hear a “a new conversation and a new debate for these new times”, including the use of a giant microphone as a hand in the incompetent Athenaeum clock on King Street.

SNP insiders explained that this method should prove “far more reliable” than using polls, which they described as “fickle and rubbish and nobody does them”, and creates a much more streamlined dialogue between the people and the government by removing the government.

In the two most recently published YouGov polls, it has been shown that a narrow majority of Scots remain opposed to independence, which pro campaigners have said confirms the illegitimacy of the sample since “everyone [they] know supports it”, while one activist was heard to comment that “people had Brexit flashbacks and shat”.

Given these findings, Mrs Sturgeon’s continued push on the issue has not met with support from all of her peers, with former education minister and current Norwich City manager Alex Neil calling for her to wait until there is “an evident and decisive shift” in opinion due to things getting much much worse, perhaps after the Conservative government reintroduces feudalism.

And her opponents were no less sceptical, with Scottish Labour’s James Kelly saying: “If the SNP were really listening [using the bugs] they would be focusing on bread and butter issues that matter to Scots like our public services, or the rising prices of items such as bread, and butter.”

The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats Willie Rennie also waded into the dading of the people, claiming that Mrs Sturgeon was “only pretending to listen [to the tapes of the conversations recording by the bugs]” and added that she’s “already decided that independence is the answer to Brexit”, as part of a cynical agenda to ask the Scottish population their opinion on something.

Scottish business figures Sir Iain McMillan and Jack Perry had already shared their misgivings in a letter to the Scotsman, where they explained that the question would “add uncertainty” for honest and down to earth businesses like Ineos and RBS, and that the the government should focus on education, the NHS and the economy, despite apparent scepticism over the SNP’s ability to multi-task.

The party’s most recent manifesto stated that the party “reserved the right” to pose the question were the United Kingdom to leave the EU, an outcome that 62% of Scotland rejected, suggesting that whether justified by straw or bug, a second independence referendum is inevitable and that the party built on the pursuit of such an outcome will shockingly do that thing to see if we all want another thing they said they want.