Wings Over Scotland

I spent yesterday trying to work out exactly why I was so depressed about the fatal shooting of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk.

It wasn’t because I shared many of his opinions – other than opposition to gender ideology and DEI, and (surprisingly) support for Scottish independence, we had little in common. And it wasn’t general sadness about such a young man (31), a husband and a father to two preschool children, being so brutally slain. Because over 50 people are murdered every single day in the US alone and everyone just shrugs.

Nor was it even the fact that his death was captured in all its shocking, bloody horror on video, and inescapable on social media, nor that it came just the day after footage broke of another appalling killing in the States, the unprovoked stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic who’d been released on no-fee bail despite 14 previous arrests and should never have been at large.

Nor was it the grimly predictable emergence of the fact that Kirk’s shooter appears to have been a transactivist – America’s fastest-growing murderer demographic.

In the end, the most chilling thing about this particular crime is this: Charlie Kirk was killed for doing exactly what civilised people are supposed to do.

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Last week we introduced readers to Sophia “Tarquin” Brooks, the 18-year-old boy who Graham Linehan is currently on trial for supposedly “assaulting”, and in particular his connection to disgraced former policeman and serial harasser Lynsay Watson.

(From reporting of the proceedings at Westminster Magistrates Court, it sounds very much like Watson has been directing and influencing Tarquin’s complaints to the police – which had originally been dismissed as baseless – and was largely responsible for the matter getting to trial.)

But Watson isn’t the only middle-aged trans-identifying man with whom “Tarquin” has a seemingly close relationship when it comes to the relentless, vindictive persecution of people who believe in biological sex.

We think (but haven’t been able to verify) that that’s Watson on the left of the thumbnail of the above video, in the facemask and with a brown bag amid extraordinary scenes as Tarquin left the court after giving his evidence.

But the burly, blond bespectacled man at the centre of it, who appears to be acting as some sort of official representative for “Tarquin”, is Stephanie Hayden – born Anthony Halliday, who changed his name in 2005 to Steven Hayden shortly after being released from the Sex Offenders Register (more on that below) before obtaining a GRC in the name of “Stephanie” in 2017.

Hayden is a convicted paedophile and self-described lawyer who, like Lynsay Watson, dedicates his entire life to the persecution of gender-critical campaigners.

And as remarkable as it might seem to anyone who read our previous piece, Hayden may be the more toxic of the two.

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We’ve written already about the magnitude of the error transactivists have made in bringing about the arrest of Graham Linehan on trumped-up incitement charges. But thanks to the excellent work of court reporter Nick Wallis this week, the sheer scale of it is still only beginning to unfold.

At its heart is a scarcely-believable tale about how a tiny handful of deeply mentally ill men – at the core, just three – have for years orchestrated a campaign of vindictive, hateful intimidation and terror which has caused untold suffering to individuals, done catastrophic damage to the reputation of the police, and cost the taxpayer millions of pounds, all in a desperate attempt to validate their own delusions.

It’s going to be no small task to summarise it for you. But let’s do our best.

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We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.

Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.

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This is a remarkable thing.

The Scottish Greens, who until last year were a party of government, claim to have 7,600 members. This month they conducted an election to choose two people as their “co-conveners”, from a list of four candidates, and almost 90% of the party’s members decided that they didn’t want any of them.

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Over the last week or so we’ve gone into several sections of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir “Frankly” in some detail: what gender she really thinks Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham is, blaming JK Rowling for the toxic tone of the self-ID debate and explaining how she thinks the law should be changed to let transwomen into women’s spaces in future, her unquenchable jealousy of Alex Salmond and her failure to understand the basic functioning of the Scottish justice system, and finally her laughable denial of her evil but incompetent conspiracy against her predecessor.

(All of which she chose to accompany with a series of photographs that made her look like a sinister Cockney chav crime matriarch in a Guy Ritchie movie. She once dubbed herself Scotland’s “chief mammy”, but now comes across more like Ma Baker.)

But we’ve only just finished reading the whole book, so here’s the actual review.

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Scotland’s two main political parties have published their 2024 accounts. The SNP’s can be found here, and Scottish Labour’s here. Neither tells a massively inspiring tale.

(Click pics to enlarge.)

The SNP lost £445,000 despite being boosted by donations totalling almost £940,000 from just FOUR individuals. Scottish Labour made a profit of £350,000 but only because it was bailed out to the tune of £777,000 by the UK party, otherwise it would have made a very similar loss to the SNP’s (specifically £428,000).

Neither of those things are surprising, since 2024 was a UK general election year and those are when parties spend big. But the devil, as always, is in the details.

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We’ve been here before. But let’s try to really dumb it down for the extra-stupid.

Because it isn’t actually very hard at all, and there’s no IQ test.

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Before becoming a politician Nicola Sturgeon had a brief and somewhat unsuccessful career in the world of law. Which means she has no excuse whatsoever for this:

Because in law, yes it does. That’s EXACTLY what it means.

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The media coverage of the gender-ideology revelations in Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir has been based on a couple of short sentences from it, but since the main section of the book devotes 14 pages to the subject it’s worth checking out in depth, at least until something more interesting happens.

Highly intelligent people only, obviously.

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There was one revealing moment in what was an otherwise nauseatingly sycophantic interview with Nicola Sturgeon by Adam Fleming on BBC2 last night.

And the thing it revealed is what Sturgeon’s book is really about. Because as more and more extracts have found their way into the public domain this week, the overarching theme of “Frankly” has become impossible to miss.

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As more and more of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs ooze out into the public sphere like pus leaking from a burns-victim’s blisters, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of rank, festering untruth spreading out in all directions.

First she audaciously attempted to blame Alex Salmond for supposedly leaking the news of his own arrest on false sexual-assault charges to the press, a laughably mad allegation totally derided by everyone involved including the journalist the story was leaked to (by Sturgeon’s own chief of staff, Liz Lloyd).

For good measure she then accused the MSPs investigating her conspiracy against him of being mere puppets controlled and directed by Salmond, an obvious nonsense immediately refuted by them directly, in case the idea of Murdo Fraser taking orders from Alex Salmond wasn’t already too idiotic to contemplate.

And her spewing sewage cannon still wasn’t done, managing to dredge up another smear that Salmond had been secretly opposed to equal marriage in 2012, an assertion so laughably obviously disproved by entire truckloads of evidence that making it can only have been a result of the gravest desperation.

(Or perhaps pure jealousy that Pink News never made HER their “Ally Of The Year”, as they did with both Salmond and David Cameron.)

But even so, this might be the boldest Hail Mary attempt of all.

Because even for Nicola Sturgeon, trying to rewrite time itself is an ambitious move.

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