Wings Over Scotland

As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.

One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.

(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)

So let’s see what we know.

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The phrase “the Labour Party has gotten itself into a catastrophic mess on [X]” is a sentence you can complete with almost any subject these days, whether it’s Brexit or anti-Semitism or anti-Asian racism or factionalism or Venezuela or just about anything else under the sun, so it should be no surprise that its gender policy is no different.

The party’s stance regarding all-women shortlists is now that men can be on them, so long as they say they’re women, with no questions asked, except when Labour decide arbitrarily that they aren’t really women at all because they’re obviously really men, except for all the other occasions when they’re obviously really men.

Which seemed like a timely moment for some more new poll data.

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This is definitely fine and not at all suspicious.

Geoff Aberdein is the man whose evidence could destroy the First Minister. We know he’s already told the High Court under oath that he had a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon on 29 March 2018 to discuss the Salmond affair.

Sturgeon claims otherwise, saying he just popped in for a friendly hello while seeing someone else, and that the meeting – which the Scottish Government had repeatedly denied ever happened at all, until it suddenly changed its mind and admitted it last August – was so inconsequential that she forgot about it entirely for almost a year, which is why she’d told Parliament in January 2019 that it didn’t exist.

Which of those accounts is correct will determine whether the First Minister was lying to Parliament deliberately and whether she has to resign under the Ministerial Code.

But now, not only will Aberdein – the single most important figure in the entire inquiry – NOT be called as a witness, but the public will not be allowed to see even a redacted version of his written testimony so that they can judge who’s telling the truth.

What conceivable reason could there be for that? How could either “The meeting was arranged in advance and we talked about the allegations” or “I was in visiting someone else and just popped my head round the door briefly to say hi” ever need to be a state secret the Scottish public mustn’t know? And yet it is.

No cover-up here, folks. All open and transparent and above board. There’s definitely nothing going on that the Scottish Government desperately wants to hide from you. It’s all fine. Ssssshhhh, now. Sssshhhh for Nicola like good little boys and girls. Write another of your nice wee blogs about how Boris Johnson will just give in for no reason and independence is inevitable. But no questions. Definitely no questions.

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We woke up this morning intending to write about something else, readers, and then we saw perhaps the most horrifying thing we’ve ever seen in the two years since we first started taking an interest in transgender ideology.

It’s only tangentially related to this site’s purpose, but the truth is that as human beings we cannot stand by and watch this happening without at least trying to use whatever platform we have to raise awareness of it.

(The black bars on images in this article were added by us.)

Last week the High Court in England ruled that children under the age of 16 were not medically competent to consent to treatment with so-called “puberty blocker” drugs of the type that were used to “chemically castrate” the computing pioneer Alan Turing for being homosexual (a crime in the UK in the 1950s), which is believed to have led to his suicide by cyanide poisoning at the age of 41.

The most common such drug nowadays is Lupron, used as a treatment/alternative punishment on rapists and paedophiles to reduce their offending by destroying their sexual function. It has not been tested for use on “transgender” children and nobody knows how much permanent harm it could do them (although the likely answer is “a lot”), which is why the High Court ruled against it last week.

But apparently that doesn’t matter.

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An archive of the opinion polls we’ve commissioned from Panelbase.

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At 9am today, BBC newsreader Nicholas Owen read out the headlines with the words “The Queen will lead the Remembrance Sunday celebrations – commemorations – at the Cenotaph this morning”. He was right the first time, of course.

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A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.

(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)

A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.

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