Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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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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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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.