Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.
As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.
At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.
The reaction to it was absolutely explosive. Half of the Parliamentary SNP spent the whole night running around social media frantically firefighting their own members, who were absolutely furious about what they’d just discovered. Poisonous abuse from the party’s woke faction poured out like never before. We got called every kind of bigot under the sun by SNP officeholders.
(The article, of course, made no mention of any sort of bisexual people, Jewish people, trans people or women as a group, let alone actually being prejudiced against anyone. Ironically just about the only kind of prejudice that wasn’t alleged was ageism, possibly because it might have looked a smidge too ironic coming from a bunch of bedwetting children whose core ideological stance is that anyone over 29 is a Nazi.)
But there was one thing you DIDN’T read amid the torrents of hate.
You didn’t read anyone saying a single word of the post was untrue.
You know everything’s definitely going swimmingly for Nicola Sturgeon when the white knight riding heroically to her defence is… [checks notes twice] Duncan Hothersall.
We’re very excited to find out what our secret plan is.
(We must apologise to readers at this point for the late arrival of this week’s typically splendid Chris Cairns cartoon, which in fact arrived entirely on time from our hard-working crayonist but which we’ve put on hold for a bit while we cover last night’s major breaking story and its immediate aftermath. Now on with the show.)
Sometimes people are so stupid it’s legitimately scary. For example, all the Unionist politicians in Scotland who appear to genuinely think voters won’t notice that the recent exams catastrophe affected England (run by the Tories) and Wales (run by Labour) even worse than it did Scotland, and so they keep screaming for John Swinney’s head while having nothing to say about the even worse messes bursting all over their own parties’ respective jurisdictions.
(Esler misses the fact that the “deletions” were all actually retweets of a single tweet on the Scottish Conservatives which was deleted, but the point is the same.)
It genuinely boggles our mind that anyone, let alone a professional politician whose job it is to have their finger on the public pulse, could possibly imagine they’d ever get away with such utterly brainless naked hypocrisy, apparently believing that voters have memories less than 24 hours long and enjoy having their intelligence insulted.
(Incidentally, we can’t see any good answer to the exams problem. Either you have one year of massively artificially inflated grades, with all the tricky ramifications that presents further down the line, or you have a year of grotesque injustices to thousands of blameless individual students that are logistically impossible to remedy. The former is probably the lesser of the two evils, which poses the question of why the Scottish Government was too monumentally dim to see it coming and why it wasted a week defending the latter option before inevitably caving in and doing the sensible thing it was always going to have to do and should have just done in the first place.)
The 2010s end in a matter of hours, and everyone and their genderfluid dog is writing retrospectives of the 10 years just past. This site, which came into existence in the second year of the decade, has very little interest in following suit – we’ve always been about the future.
But a cursory glance over the shoulder does reveal one immediately striking fact that’s worthy of passing note.
You could actually weep for some of the people in our country.
But the point Yes supporters understand and Unionists don’t is that it’s everything to do with the question – because “who is or might be Prime Minister, or which party is in government” is never our choice. It’s the choice of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland together. One of those countries outnumbers the others by 8 to 1.
More than that, it isn’t just who is Prime Minister now, or who may be in the future – it’s every single Prime Minister in my 35 years of existence on this planet.
Let’s leave aside the most toweringly and obviously cretinous aspect of that insanely illogical claim for a moment – namely, if the McCrone Report was such a smoking gun proving independence would be bad, why did the UK government suppress it for 30 years rather than sending a copy to every home in Scotland and shouting it from the rooftops every single day? – and just quickly look at what it actually said.
The plugin which normally embeds our Twitter feed on the Wings front page still isn’t working (doubtless because Twitter have made yet more spiteful and idiotic changes to their API), so those of you who don’t use the social media platform may have missed out on a gem this morning from everyone’s favourite Labour ultra-moderate.
Phew! Saved from economic devastation! Sounds like a narrow escape!
When the news is slow, we sometimes steel ourselves and go for a little paddle in the Yoonstream – a private collection of the most unhinged hardcore-Unionist accounts on Twitter – and see what they’re getting themselves all worked up about.
For a good few months now, they’ve all been posting mad graphs like this:
We’ve been keeping coverage of our ongoing court battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale to a minimum on the site, partly because little of any material impact has actually happened yet.
However, there was a mildly interesting development last night, which was scooped and accurately reported by the Scottish Sun.
Reactions to the party’s statement have already seen serious amounts of what we’re generously going to call “misinformation” generated and circulating around social media, so we’re going to have to clear some of it up. Apologies.
