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Unhinged Malady 166

Posted on April 23, 2025 by

Yesterday the Scottish media gave Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman what she’s never willingly given anyone else – a platform on which to make her case.

Most did a very poor job challenging her on her outrageous comments about the Supreme Court, with BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime show being an especially wretched example of allowing the interviewee to ignore every question and then just ramble on endlessly about something else entirely, but LBC’s Gina Davidson was on top of her brief and put all the points that reasonable people wanted to be made, while giving Chapman ample time to answer uninterrupted.

Let’s break down how that went, with the help of our handy Bullshit Buzzer.

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The Day Everything Changed 46

Posted on April 17, 2025 by

We’ll be honest, readers, we gasped out loud when we saw this.

That such a basic, fundamental truth of human existence should ever be front page news with the capacity to shock 100,000 years after we invented language is a sign of just how insane our world has become since 2015.

But magnificent as it is, it’s not even today’s BEST front cover.

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The highlights show 53

Posted on April 16, 2025 by

For those among you who don’t have the time or patience to wade through 88 pages of judicial lingo, we’ve distilled today’s Supreme Court judgment down to its key points.

Much of it, of course, can be summarised as “the bleeding obvious”.

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Fantasy World Dizzy 36

Posted on April 15, 2025 by

Because you certainly are a bit light-headed if you’re buying this horse-plop.

We don’t normally spend much time analysing opinion polls more than a year out from an election because it’s a complete chump’s game – too much can happen. But this one’s so absolutely batshit mad that we couldn’t resist a bit of a probe.

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A kind of freedom 11

Posted on April 15, 2025 by

Alert readers will have noticed our so-far-fruitless attempts to extract information from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator regarding the disturbing activities of the controversy-plagued LGBT Youth Scotland.

We are far from the only people raising concerns about the charity – we know of at least 17 separate formal complaints against LGBTYS in the past year alone, yet the OSCR has declined to open any sort of formal inquiry into them. (It carried out three such inquiries in 2024.)

But despite the OSCR’s assertion that “we strive to be transparent and accountable”, when we went to find those complaints (including, of course, the one from ourselves) to link you to them, we hit a brick wall that rapidly turned into a whole new concern.

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Once more the pantomime 21

Posted on April 15, 2025 by

In relation to yesterday’s article, we’ve now filed the following with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.

I request a review of this decision.

Firstly, I wish to note that since the response I received was a wholly generic one containing no reference or relevance to any of the specifics of my case, it should not have taken until the 28th day of the 28-day deadline to deliver. This appears to be a deliberate stalling tactic.

The information I sought did not involve the disclosure of any sensitive identities or data. It is in fact an attempt to establish the answer to an extremely basic question of first principles: why is LGBT Youth Scotland operating so far outwith its stated remit?

Since the fact that it IS doing so is not in any question – its own public statements declare that it is operating widely and openly in primary schools – it is a matter of plain and overwhelming public interest that this glaring anomaly be explained. The charity itself refuses to do so, or even to enter into any discussion of the matter, so it becomes a matter for its ostensible regulator.

Since the public is unable to ask the OSCR to speak on behalf of LGBTYS, the only remaining option to achieve transparency, accountability and public confidence is to seek the information requested and thereby discern the answer via the OSCR.

Particularly given LGBTYS’s unfortunate record of involvement with extremely serious child abuse, and its highly controversial position on matters such as “puberty blockers” – on which it is starkly at odds with the stated position of the Scottish Government – this matter cannot simply be swept under the carpet and the public ordered to mind its own business. Someone, somewhere, at some level of Scottish civic life, must answer the question:

Why is an organisation whose remit concerns intrinsically sexual matters and exclusively encompasses 13-25-year-olds being allowed to operate in primary (and indeed nursery) schools and discuss such sexual matters with children 10 years below its minimum stipulated age range?

Given LGBTYS’s refusal, that duty then lies with the OSCR, and it should not evade it. The public deserves to know both that OSCR has in fact complied with its own responsibilities and carried out a satisfactory investigation, and what the outcome of that investigation was, given that nothing has changed in respect of the charity’s actions since concerns were raised with the OSCR a year ago and LGBTYS continues to far exceed its stated brief.

There are in this case no redactions which would reveal any sort of information that would place anyone at risk. The identities of LGBTYS and/or OSCR employees could be safely redacted if appropriate, while the substance of the discussion remained visible. What matters is that the question was asked, and that the public be told the answer.

None of OSCR’s stated objections to answering the FOI request are pertinent to this particular enquiry. It has no valid excuse to refuse. We fully expect it to do so anyway, because nobody in Scotland is answerable for anything any more. But we’re required to give them another 28 days to waste everyone’s time before we approach the only person in Scotland who appears to still believe in their civic and professional duty: the Information Commissioner.

Barring a miracle, we’ll see you on the 15th of May, readers.

The Groomer’s Shield 126

Posted on April 14, 2025 by

Alert readers will recall that Wings has for the past year been attempting to establish why controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland is being allowed to operate in primary schools across Scotland, discussing sexual matters with children as young as four, despite only being supposed to deal with young people aged between 13 and 25.

Having received no response from multiple emails to the charity, we raised the matter with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator last year, and heard nothing from them about the results of their investigation – or indeed, come to that, about whether they’d actually conducted an investigation at all.

So a month ago we sent them a Freedom Of Information request to find out. At the last possible second before the deadline to reply expired, the OSCR have this morning deigned to grace us with their response, which you can read below.

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SNP 2025 Update 104

Posted on April 13, 2025 by

So here’s where we’re at.

Fat 20 grand pay rises for themselves, taking the salary of every minister and junior minister (which is almost half of SNP MSPs) over £100,000. Nice.

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The more you change nothing 147

Posted on April 10, 2025 by

…the more everything will stay the same.

The cash-strapped SNP might have slimmed down its staff roster lately, but it’s the same toxic blend of intolerance and incompetence it’s been for the last decade.

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Empty hands and empty heads 54

Posted on April 09, 2025 by

Now, readers, we won’t pretend to you that our expectations were high.

But you may nevertheless wish to steel yourselves before you hear the “offer”.

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The Long Future 199

Posted on March 27, 2025 by

As he often does, Robin McAlpine has an interesting blog post up.

Now, as alert readers will know, we’ve been calling for that on Wings for at least the last couple of years. For sane people any credible hope of reforming the SNP is long gone, by the deliberate design of its leadership, and so has almost any real pretence at pursuing independence at all. The party now exists solely to milk another few years at the gravy trough off the backs of the hopelessly gullible.

But there’s a problem with the idea.

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Live chat update 98

Posted on March 17, 2025 by

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.

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