Wings Over Scotland

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.

Today is the second kind of day.

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Alert readers may have noticed that our Twitter account has returned again. Hopefully this time it’ll last longer than a week under the inevitable barrage of attacks from transactivists and SNP MSPs.

(We haven’t had any contact from Twitter about it, people just noticed the account was live again last night and told us about it, so we don’t know what the reason was.)

And someone used the occasion to point out that it was exactly five years ago today that we published our first piece on the subject of “gender reform”.

It’s still quite a shocking read even half a decade down the line.

We’ve only actually had 93 posts on trans issues in those five years, or an average of about one every three weeks. We know it feels like more. And we know that some of you thought we’d gone mad when we started warning about it.

But hopefully some of you have realised just what’s at stake, and even if you don’t care about that, how much it might cost the cause of independence. We really hope we can stop talking about it soon, if only so we don’t keep getting banned from Twitter.

In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.

At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.

But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.

And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.

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Things change very slowly, then very suddenly. Here’s to better days, readers.

Past and future.

It’s manifestly obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention to Scottish politics that the current Holyrood chamber is stuffed to the gills with otherwise-unemployable dum-dums. When we recently had cause to go through the entire roster of 129, the number who leapt out as either vaguely honourable or even just halfway-competent didn’t require us to take our shoes off to count.

(Indeed, speaking as a professional Scottish politics website about a thousand times more interested in this stuff than normal people, the number of expenses-guzzling seatwarmers we’d never even heard of was more than a little disturbing.)

So these figures from a Panelbase poll this month – which was conducted BEFORE the grim scenes around the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform bill – can only be explained in two ways: either people have become accustomed to very low standards, or (more likely) people don’t pay that much attention to politics.

But there’s a much more interesting story in the numbers.

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It was already quite bold/crass to equate “letting rapists change their legal sex so their victim has to refer to them as ‘she’ in court” with the life’s work of Nelson Mandela.

But the punchline was still a chef’s kiss to treasure.

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This is a most peculiar intervention.

Religious figures normally restrict their political commentary to matters within their obvious remit, such as poverty and inequality, for which they can cite plentiful scripture about rich men and the eyes of needles and whatnot. We’re unaware of any passages in the Bible relating to the constitutional implications of the Scotland Act 1998.

Moderator in the Church Of Scotland is a ceremonial role lasting only 12 months, but Dr Iain Greenshields has attempted to put his stamp on it (one for the folks at home, there) by opining that a UK general election – and he was quite specific about meaning a UK one – is not an appropriate means of achieving Scotland’s independence.

From his quoted comments in the Times piece it’s not clear whether he’s some sort of ecumenical Kenny Farquharson who just wants Scots to shut up and vote Labour again, or a radical Yes supporter attempting to subtly influence the SNP towards a Holyrood plebiscite instead. But either way, for such a traditionally-neutral figure to come out with such an unexpectedly blunt political opinion is perhaps a sign of just what a terrible idea using a Westminster election to decide Scotland’s future is.

I’ll be honest, readers, I’m so exhausted from despising the sickening nonce-panderers of the SNP this week that I can’t summon the energy to write any more about them. So I’m going to hand over to some other people.

All pics are links so that you can read full threads, see context and access any linked articles, and all these people are worth following.

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The last few days have been perhaps the most turbulent in the entire history of the modern Scottish Parliament. Proceedings have been suspended repeatedly, members of the public thrown out and threatened with arrest, filibusters attempted, carol services cancelled, tempers frayed and sittings going on until the wee small hours.

All of this has happened in the service of the policy that the SNP has made its flagship priority for the last two years and more – the destruction not only of women’s rights, but of the very CONCEPT of a woman.

So you’d imagine the party would have been tweeting about it constantly, keeping its supporters informed about all the dramatic events and the progress of the bill, if only to reassure them that they were determined to get it passed before the Christmas break come what may.

And yet strangely, up until it retweeted a tweet from The National about the bill finally passing a few minutes ago, the SNP Twitter account had not made a single mention of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in the entirety of the last week.

It certainly hadn’t been quiet – it’s been churning out scores and scores of tweets on subjects from the NHS to Rwanda deportations, the COP15 summit, Brexit, early learning, FMQs, winter fuel payments, International Human Solidarity Day, train fares, independence polls, the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, free school meals, income tax, drugs, net zero, industrial disputes, the cost of living and dozens more.

But there wasn’t one solitary word about the thing it just spent three solid days forcing into law. And since it was a thing that most of its own voters, and indeed a huge majority of all Scots, were opposed to, readers might be forgiven for thinking that they just wanted it all kept as quiet as possible, as if they were ashamed.

We suspect, and very much hope, that their wish may not be granted.

Last night this happened.

The events marked simply and unquestionably the most shameful and contemptible moment in the history of the Scottish Parliament since 1707.

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The newest Panelbase poll, which shows a narrow lead for independence, was an “omnibus” one with questions provided by multiple clients, including Wings and the Sunday Times. The questions we’re about to show you were asked by the ST rather than ourselves, but their results are deeply disturbing on multiple levels.

The first one is perhaps predictable but still unsettling. (Click all pics to enlarge.)

A huge 2:1 majority of Scots believe the Scottish Government’s proposed new “gender recognition” laws pose a safety risk to women. Tory voters think so by almost 9:1, Lib Dem voters by almost 6:1, and Labour voters by nearly 2:1.

That can only partly be explained away by partisan party loyalty – Labour and the Liberal Democrats both support the bill, but their own voters are still strongly against. More noteworthy is the fact that (excluding Don’t Knows) even slavishly loyal SNP voters agree with the statement by a smaller but still clear 12-point margin, 56 to 44.

So let’s say it unambiguously: most SNP voters think the SNP’s gender reforms pose a danger to women’s safety.

But that’s not the disturbing bit.

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This is a quite extraordinary thing for a grown adult to say.

When a reader quoted it in a comment earlier today we were reluctant to believe it. Googling the words produced only a broken Facebook link and a Scottish Daily Express story (and the Wings reader’s comment), which obviously did little to disperse the scepticism.

Facebook is essentially unsearchable (which in itself is a pretty good reason not to trust anyone who does the majority of their work on it), and even when we went to the Believe In Scotland page and scrolled down and down and down and down for an eternity, it was impossible to find.

But eventually we had a brainwave and searched the site’s pictures for the one used in the Express and found the post. He really said it. And it needs some examination.

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