Wings Over Scotland

Much of Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK and beyond (the story below ran in the London Standard), has been grimly gripped this week by the ongoing and scarcely believable trainwreck that is Sandie Peggie Vs NHS Fife.

The tribunal has now overrun the time allotted to it, and will reconvene for another 10 days in the second half of July, ramping up the already considerable costs incurred by NHS Fife, which is in the middle of a huge financial crisis.

According to legal experts, there is little doubt about the law surrounding the dispute. NHS Fife is clearly and unambiguously in the wrong – Dr Beth Upton, the transwoman at the centre of the problem, is legally as well as biologically male, and had no lawful entitlement to be in a female changing room. The authority also appears to be in very considerable potential trouble over failing to disclose key documents and evidence when ordered by the original judge.

So it seems remarkable that the board of NHS Fife is allowing the case to continue rather than immediately conceding to save money and any more public humiliation of both itself and its staff, like the hapless nurse manager Esther Davidson who endured a very uncomfortable two days in the witness box this week, and the clearly manifestly incompetent Equality And Human Rights Lead Officer, Isla Bumba, who yesterday deleted her LinkedIn page after being identified as the person who gave Davidson incorrect and unlawful guidance.

(Bumba is a 29-year-old immunology graduate and former bartender who ditched the challenging and gruelling field of vaccine development for a rather cushier number in pronoun-policing for £40-47,000 a year, somewhat more than the £31,000 average wage for staff nurses like Sandie Peggie, who’s been in the profession for longer than Bumba has been alive.)

Readers may reasonably wonder if the makeup of the board might offer some clues.

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This site hasn’t had much nice to say about the former CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Mridul Wadhwa, or the (incredibly) still-CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland, Sandy Brindley. But we’re going to thank them today, because it’s hard to see how anyone else could have been chiefly responsible for this.

Just four and a half years ago, every demographic group in the UK supported – either by a plurality or an outright majority – the presence of transwomen in women’s rape crisis centres. But today, eight out of 10 of those groups now oppose it, five by an absolute majority, with only 18-24-year-olds and (barely) Labour voters clinging on.

(Which is probably why ERCC has stuffed its board with children.)

Sometimes even awful people can trigger good outcomes. Cheers, sir and madam.

Readers may have noticed recent speculation in the media (based on the wording of a press release) that Police Scotland had ended their investigations regarding Operation Branchform. As it happened we’d already submitted a Freedom Of Information request aimed at finding that out, and the response arrived this evening.

You can read it below.

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As alert Wings readers will know, we’re fond of a WW2 analogy from time to time. The conflict is so extensively documented, and so deeply embedded in British culture (for both good and ill), that it’s a reliable tool for getting points across concisely and clearly.

(It’s also one of the last major wars in which, overall, the good guys and the bad guys were pretty indisputably easy to identify.)

So let’s keep that in mind for a moment while we look at this.

And then let’s talk about Stalingrad.

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For 10 years in Germany between 1935 and 1945, Jewish people were not legally human. The Nuremberg Laws, drafted in large part by Wilhelm Stuckart, established the principle in law that Jews were to be denied any rights on the basis that they were untermensch, a German word literally meaning “subhuman”.

It would be, to say the least, highly controversial for anyone to put forward in 2025 the idea that Jewish people had actually ceased to be human beings during that period, even though the various laws had been passed by a legitimately-elected government in peacetime and attracted little in the way of international condemnation.

The truth is that regardless of what the law said, Jewish people remained humans for the whole time, which is why Nazi war criminals were tried after the war for “crimes against humanity”. The passing of a law had had absolutely no effect on their biological reality. (Other than that it led to millions of them being murdered, of course.)

But anyway. Nicola Sturgeon.

Is the above how she imagined her feminist legacy, do you think, readers?

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Let’s take a passing moment just to reflect on how grotesque this is.

When she was leader, Sturgeon forced MPs and MSPs like Michelle Thomson and Mark McDonald – neither of whom were even spoken to by police, let alone arrested or questioned or charged – out of the SNP lest even the mere suggestion of wrongdoing bring shame on the party.

She is still under police investigation on suspicion of EMBEZZLING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF POUNDS FROM THE SNP, and her husband and former party CEO has actually been charged with it. She is personally on record, on video, ordering the NEC not to question the state of party finances at the time of the alleged offences.

Yet not only has she had the lack of class not to resign the whip voluntarily, not only has she shown no interest in turning up and doing the job for the last two years, but she’s actually put herself forward to stand again, and doddering, spineless caretaker John Swinney hasn’t had the stones to put a stop to it.

Nobody thinks she’s even going to actually run next year – she spends most of her time gallivanting around celebrity events talking about her life after politics – so she’s just wasting everyone’s time and trolling.

Nobody in history has ever taken the SNP for a ride as cynically as this. But the party is so rotten and broken and weak that it just meekly goes along with it, and yet still dares to pretend it’s up to the rather tougher task of making Scotland independent.

We have no words for anyone still stupid enough to believe in it.

This is the SNP’s latest messaging. Ministers, MSPs, payroll drones and the central party account were all tweeting the graphic and variations on the line yesterday.

And it’s quite difficult even just to count the number of different ways in which it’s not just mind-bogglingly offensive, but also clatteringly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

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It’s a well-known truism that if a newspaper headline is phrased as a question, the answer to that question is always “No”.

And nothing’s changed here.

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It’s worth remembering that they didn’t have to do this.

Labour had already announced their intention to abstain. There was no danger of the budget being defeated. So the SNP could have allocated however much money they wanted from their increased funding to the pursuit of independence.

And maybe they did.

People sometimes ask us if we get bored of being right all the time.

But in truth, we just wish we had to work a bit harder at it.

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Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.

You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).

We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.

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We’re stuck indoors waiting for a repairman today, so we had a little read-around of some of the less popular Scottish politics blogs to pass the time, and noted this:

James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, which we gather from its front page was seemingly one of the “Top 50 Left-Wing Blogs of 2011”, is noticeably insistent on making the argument that we’re “stalking” and “obsessed” with him.

So as we do, we thought we’d check the facts.

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