Wings Over Scotland

Survation released their final projection for the election last night. It’s quite a boring image because they had to make it mostly grey to correctly illustrate the margin of Labour’s lead.

Those ranges are substantial, but even their BEST-case scenario for the Tories is below 100 seats. The WORST-case scenario for Labour – 447 seats – still gives them a majority of 244, which would smash the all-time record of 209 set by the Tories exactly 100 years ago. (The best case is a dizzying 384.)

Scotland is probably the hardest area of the UK to call. In most polls there are only a few points between Labour and the SNP, and depending on how the votes are spread and who’s best at getting their support out either could still win the most seats.

That won’t, of course, make the slightest difference to the governance of the UK for the next five years. Even 57 Scottish MPs out of 57, for any party, would be completely meaningless to a government with a majority of over 200.

But it’ll make a big difference to the independence movement. Because if the SNP manages to hold onto to a significant proportion of its seats, we can all wave goodbye to the slightest chance of progress for another decade on top of the one that’s been wasted since Alex Salmond resigned.

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There are now just 10 days until the general election. Wings has never told its readers how to vote and we’re not going to start now. Which is lucky, because if we were, we wouldn’t have a clue how to.

Just, y’know, not for any of these wretched, worthless shiters.

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When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.

You also come to expect injustice, like last night’s inexplicable failure of VAR – which has unfailingly spotted micro-infringements like a player’s toenail being offside – to even take a look at a nailed-on stonewall penalty in the last minutes of the game.

But because you’re so used to these things, you’re not expecting rage.

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This is one of the strangest political campaign videos we’ve ever seen.

Join us as we try to make sense of it.

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We’re still trying not to pay attention to the election because it’s so tedious and awful and pointless, but this is worth putting on the record because it’s in The National and otherwise nobody’s going to read it.

Short version: all the way back to surrender.

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If you wanted to hear me yakking on about Scottish and UK politics for 45 minutes, an excellent way to achieve it would be clicking this image.

If not, it’s probably best if you don’t.

We’re going to be really, REALLY generous and not quibble about the “us”.

Because it’s not even nearly the funniest thing here.

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We were a little perplexed by this story.

Because, for startlingly obvious reasons, even the SNP hasn’t had the brass neck to do a general fundraiser for this election, with the police’s inquiries still going on into the whereabouts of the cash from their last big appeals.

But in fact the party has managed to wring over £100,000 from the most gullible of its remaining supporters in the days since the election was announced. It’s just been a bit more subtle about it.

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So we’ve had a response from Adam Ramsay to our article of yesterday about him. We’ll publish it in full, in the interests of fairness.

And, well, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask some questions.

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There’s something very unusual – possibly unique, we think – about the reaction of the transactivist community to this week’s tribunal judgement in Roz Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).

Normally in cases like these, there’s an instant and concerted attempt to rubbish the judgement, both from amateurs and activist lawyers like Robin Moira “Barry” White, Jolyon Maugham, and the anonymous “Pissed Off Lawyer” tweeting as @legaltweetz. They’ll issue spurious “analyses” dismissing the findings with jargon terms like “obiter”, and either question their correctness or attempt to minimise their significance.

For some reason that didn’t happen this time. The hyper-antagonist online trans army has very conspicuously failed to rush to the defence of ERCC CEO Mridul Wadhwa, perhaps because Judge Ian McFatridge’s conclusions were so relentlessly, brutally and comprehensively excoriating of Wadhwa’s appalling behaviour that no amount of spin or disingenuity could disguise it.

But then, on white charger and with papoose, enter a hero.

Ladies and gentlemen (and non-binary genderfluids), meet Adam Ramsay.

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The judgement in the case of a support worker constructively dismissed by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2022 is one of the most excoriating we’ve ever read.

Mridul Wadhwa, a man with whom Wings readers have been familiar for some years, was found by the tribunal judge to have been “the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place” as Roz Adams, a conscientious, caring and highly professional woman with a long history in the sector, was systematically and methodically hounded out of her job for holding, privately and sensitively, the belief that biological sex is real.

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The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:

Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.

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