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.
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.
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?
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.
Since it was founded back in November 2011, Wings Over Scotland has been solely financed by its readers. The site has never carried any advertising, we have no secret corporate backers, everything we do is funded by transparent voluntary donations and subscriptions, mostly of a few pounds a month.
We have the freedom to write what we believe, thanks to you, our readers. And since those earliest days, opponents have tried to end that freedom by blocking our funding.
Just a quick bit of housekeeping here with regard to the new Wings comments section, which offers far more functionality but has also attracted a few complaints because it’s no longer a straight chronology of oldest-to-newest tweets.
(We could actually change that back, but the cost would be losing the ability to reply directly to individual comments, which is a big loss, so we’re leaving it as it is for now.)
To those beefing because that means you can’t now immediately tell which comments are new, a couple of helpful pointers. The easiest way to fix the problem is a simple one: keep the tab open.
If you keep the most recent page open in a tab on your browser, the Comment Bubble (visible at the bottom left of that pic) will keep track of all new comments – it refreshes every 30 seconds – and highlight them for you in yellow until you’ve read them.
(The little orange circle should take you to the first unread one if you click it.)
Sadly the Bubble stops working if you close the tab or navigate to a new page from it, but since most people have scores of tabs open at a time that shouldn’t be a problem. So there you go.
Thanks to the dedication of our legal team in working over the Easter holiday, Wings has unexpectedly received the formal Opinion of legal counsel (hereafter called “the Opinion”, capitalised to avoid confusion with the ordinary use of the word in the article) with regard to the standing of the site in the light of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which comes into force tomorrow.
We publish the Opinion below, partly to assist those worried about the Act’s impact on them but unable to afford their own legal advice.
But we also do so to place Police Scotland on notice that anything published by Wings Over Scotland is done in the light of the greatest possible care having been taken to ensure compliance with the law, and that in such a context any future attempt/s to improperly interfere with our rights of free expression under Article 10 of the European Convention On Human Rights (ECHR) will be viewed with regard to pursuing the maximum available recourse for wrongful restriction of our lawful activities.
We have both funds and the will to pursue such action.
So, it being Good Friday, we’re definitely not going to receive our legal opinion before Monday now, so Wings Over Scotland will be shutting down, at least temporarily, on Sunday evening. No posts will be visible on the site and our Twitter account will be either locked down or deactivated while we await advice on whether either can return.
In the meantime you can hear of any developments, or get in touch, on my personal account @RevStu or on @TheGhostOfWings, both of which have had, or are about to have, all their old tweets wiped.
We’re not going to overdramatise, because we hope this is only for a few days. We’re optimistic that the Scottish Government’s abysmal, sinister and totalitarian Hate Crime Act, opposed across every sector of Scottish society and even by the police charged with implementing it, will not put an end to 12 and a half years of political journalism.
The great unknown in the SNP leadership contest is an extremely significant one: who are the voters? Nobody but Peter Murrell really knows how many members the party has, but almost nobody believes the claimed number of over 100,000. (Our guess, based on pretty much nothing but a gut feeling, is 75,000 plus or minus 5000.)
But more to the point, nobody knows who they are. The average member age in most political parties is over 50, and according to figures published in 2019, more than 80% of SNP members are over 40, with half of those being over 60. There’s also an almost 3:2 bias in favour of men.
(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.)
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.
A week ago, readers, I had not the slightest interest in bringing Wings Over Scotland back full-time. I had my Twitter account again and was having fun and I was happy with that. It scratched the itch of being able to engage with politics (and people) without the depressing business of wading in it for work.
And then I witnessed the quite extraordinary sight of an elected member of Parliament, in the shape of the SNP’s pico-witted ambulant brain vacuum Karen Adam, publicly gloating about having managed to shut down the voice of someone critical of her party.
At the same time, an extremely minor blogger (the word “rival” would be to over-dignify them) re-opened hostilities in his campaign of self-declared “open warfare” against this site, with a rapid succession of posts (just a few of dozens) forming such a demented scattershot tirade that to patiently debunk all of it would have taken until Christmas.
And I’ll be honest, folks, it all pushed my buttons a wee bit. It really shouldn’t have, but it was properly outrageous and I’m occasionally human, so I thought “Sod it, if I’m going to have to put up with all this crap anyway I might as well make it worthwhile”.
James Barr Gardner on What We Don’t Know Now: “O/T has anyone been booted off Facebook this week ?” Jun 8, 19:43
agent x on What We Don’t Know Now: “Oh dear – another topic quoting “polls”. When will people learn?” Jun 8, 19:30
Dunx on What We Don’t Know Now: “That would be more useful if it was written in a language that most Scots could understand. It’s current version…” Jun 8, 18:48
Hatey McHateface on What We Don’t Know Now: “So the takeaway from Labour (a foreign, pro-union party) winning the by-election is that the union is in more trouble…” Jun 8, 18:38
Geri on What We Don’t Know Now: “It could start with him holding a leadership election & the SNP already has/had a current commanding position, still live…” Jun 8, 18:29
Geoff Anderson on What We Don’t Know Now: “As regards Independence the reality is that it is finished because the SNP will get the votes of the deluded…” Jun 8, 17:32
100%Yes on What We Don’t Know Now: “Who are the membership of the SNP and what is their IQ, these are the questions most of us has…” Jun 8, 17:00
David on What We Don’t Know Now: “My final thought. If I could relate it to the NHS. The NHS has recruited overseas and is now got…” Jun 8, 16:58
Mia on What We Don’t Know Now: ““Alba not standing candidates is curious to me” I couldn’t agree more. It does not look like Alba is seeking…” Jun 8, 16:51
duncanio on What We Don’t Know Now: “Yep. The SNP have been in a “commanding position” since May 2015 – Swinney is hoping that the dumb electorate…” Jun 8, 16:33
Liz on What We Don’t Know Now: “Swinney is reported to have said, he’s rearranging the deck chairs in the Cabinet BECAUSE of the loss in Hamilton…” Jun 8, 16:27
Alf Baird on What We Don’t Know Now: “Scots fowk awready hiv thair ain constitution: https://salvo.scot/the-scottis-constitutional-covin/” Jun 8, 16:20
Stuart MacKay on What We Don’t Know Now: “Just get version 0 out there, put out a call for review / input, and revise as necessary. The one…” Jun 8, 15:43
Iain mhor on What We Don’t Know Now: “Alba not standing candidates is curious to me. Fair enough if it is purely a fiancial matter, but tactically you’d…” Jun 8, 15:35
Rev. Stuart Campbell on The Jokers: ““Interesting to see RevStu again gloating at SNP failure. Perhaps he’s right to insist that the SNP are no longer…” Jun 8, 15:30
Dave on What We Don’t Know Now: “Swinney talks in abstract terms: “And that comes about by the SNP performing much better, of getting into a commanding…” Jun 8, 15:11
Hatey McHateface on What We Don’t Know Now: ““Whose niece is she?” That’s just so baaadddd. And I’m loving it!” Jun 8, 15:02
Stuart LAW on What We Don’t Know Now: “Believing in Independence, and being willing to vote for it, are two very different things. Because we’ve all seen what…” Jun 8, 14:59
Campbell Clansman on What We Don’t Know Now: “Since the running average of polls shows that support for Indy ISN’T above 50%; And since the voters repeatedly vote…” Jun 8, 14:58
Hatey McHateface on The Jokers: “Hi George, Thanks for the update. I was referring to Ferguson’s OG for Iceland Good luck with the ongoing…” Jun 8, 14:55
George Ferguson on The Jokers: “@Hatey McHateface What Ferguson are you referring to here? Here is a wee update from me. I got an estimate…” Jun 8, 14:37
Aidan on The Jokers: “I don’t know who is more insane, the people continually competing with each other to offer the most insane, delusional,…” Jun 8, 14:16
duncanio on What We Don’t Know Now: “The First Minister in an interview reported in The Sunday National today said: “My challenge is to make sure that…” Jun 8, 14:07
Rev. Stuart Campbell on What We Don’t Know Now: “Larkhall was part of the constituency for the 14 years the SNP have held it.” Jun 8, 13:49
gm on What We Don’t Know Now: “A logical, fair assessment. Fairer than I would be to the SNPs controlling clique. With support for Independence above 50%…” Jun 8, 13:43
Allison Graham on What We Don’t Know Now: “Agee with all of the above Stu. If Scotland wants a different future folk must work in reality not fantasy…” Jun 8, 13:26
Ian McCubbin on What We Don’t Know Now: “Still no mention of vast majority of Independence voters of which there must be about 1000000, and there 2nd vote…” Jun 8, 13:22