So as promised, and having now spent 11 months trying to get answers any other way, this afternoon we had a live chat with controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
Below is how it went.
In April last year we wrote to LGBT Youth Scotland asking them to explain why they were conducting activities in primary schools (and even with pre-school children) about sexual matters despite only having a remit to work with young people aged 13-25.
We received no reply, so we contacted the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, who sent a rather sniffy acknowledgement saying:
“If your concern leads us to making inquiries with the charity, we are unable to update you on the status of those inquiries. For more information about what to expect after you submit a concern, read our guidance on how OSCR deals with concerns and inquiries.”
That link, you’ll be amazed to hear, leads to a dead page.
You know what, Surrey Live, we think you’re probably right.
We DO think people will remember him.
The Presiding Officer has finally reluctantly deigned to allow the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issues arising from Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife, in the shape of a debate taking place in the chamber this afternoon brought forward by the Scottish Tories.
We suspect that watching it will be profound waste of time and a grave danger to our monitor screens, but we’ll certainly at least tune in for the votes at the end, because which motion/amendment the Parliament puts its name to will be a revealing moment.
Let’s quickly run those through a translator.
Some of our more alert readers may recall the events of four years ago this month, when a mob of SNP representatives all suddenly raged against the idea of (perfectly legally) “gaming” the Holyrood electoral system to produce a pro-indy supermajority.
Voters try to organise themselves to maximise their desired outcomes all the time (see various tactical-voting campaigns), and so do political parties – witness John Swinney’s current plans for a grand anti-Reform coalition. And of course, the SNP never objected to indy voters voting for a different party on the list if it was the Greens. The entire thing was just a poorly-disguised attack on Alba.
But even so, guess what? The rules just changed again.
In April 2021, the SNP were still the undisputed masters of all they surveyed. A poll conducted by Ipsos MORI that month showed them on 53% of the vote for the Scottish Parliament, a jawdropping 33 points ahead of their nearest rivals.
When the Holyrood election a month later was held, they won 64 seats, one more than they had done in 2016. Yet despite having led a minority government without any significant difficulties for the preceding five years, Nicola Sturgeon chose to invite the Greens to form a coalition with her party, and the effect that had on the public’s view of the government was… well, let’s see.
Welcome back to what will hopefully be normal service after we’ve been spending the last few days battling off a determined and temporarily successful attempt at hacking the site. Apologies to those who had clicks intercepted and redirected to a malware site which tried to get people to download dodgy .EXE files, but our readers are far too alert to ever fall for such things so no harm should have been done.
So back to business, which for us often means pointing out things that have been said in newspapers that aren’t true, which brings us to last Friday’s issue of The National.
Because the above simply isn’t what happened.
A couple of days ago a reader asked on Twitter if we thought Reform, who continue to lead in UK opinion polling, might allow a second indyref if they actually got into power, as it would for obvious reasons be hypocritical of them not to. And to be frank we dismissed it out of hand, because Nigel Farage is the ultimate British nationalist, he’d have no obvious political reason to, and since when did hypocrisy bother politicians?
And then last night a longstanding Courier/Press & Journal reporter (who despite that is an all-round decent chap and indy supporter) tweeted this:
And actually, on further thought, that’s not the craziest idea at all.
We actually agree with John Swinney here.
The law – more specifically the Workplace (Health, Safety, and Welfare) Regulations 1992 – is indeed “crystal clear”. It states, wholly unambiguously, that men and women must be provided with separate single-sex changing facilities, which could under NO lawful conditions include Dr “Beth” Upton and nurse Sandie Peggie at the same time.
The difficulty is that any minute now, someone is going to ask the beleaguered First Minister the staggeringly obvious question that arises from the fact, namely:
Why didn’t NHS Fife know that?
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.
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.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
