THE blogger behind the Wings Over Scotland site has hit back at an MP who described him as a “busted flush” and the “SNP’s answer to Voldemort”.

Writing in yesterday’s The National, Alyn Smith hit out at the blog’s “organised attempts to influence my party”.

He added: “There was a time when the Wings over Scotland site was a useful forum – when it actually wrote about independence.

“The Wee Blue Book was a significant contribution to the 2014 campaign, I emulated it in the 2016 EU referendum with the Wee BlEU Book.

“But these days it is a sad busted flush, well past the point of utility.

“The site all but constantly berates us for obsession on trans rights but I see nowhere more obsessed with the issue than that site.”

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Responding on his blog, Stu Campbell, who runs Wings Over Scotland said: “A sad busted flush? In August we noted that we’d recorded 670,000 visits in July, far more than every other indy site big enough to register statistics put together.”

He said the visits to the site were up by 28% compared to August and that the blog “comprises 61% of all traffic to stat-recorded pro-indy websites, up from 55% in August.”

Campbell said he’s been considering taking a break but now wouldn’t.

“We feel like we’re just repeating ourselves a lot at the moment, because Covid-19 has killed all normal politics and almost all there is left to do is point out the absolute cancer tearing the SNP apart from the inside,” he said.

The statistics, he added, showed that his readers wanted to hear more.

In the column, Smith also attacked the SNP Common Weal group and SNP Women’s Pledge, saying he was sceptical about “external organisation endorsing, or not, candidates for internal roles”.

“We might as well ask the SSPCA.”