Wings Over Scotland

There is a not particularly funny joke that is sometimes told in legal circles about why a law student failed to finish his coursework – because he had no conviction. With rare exceptions lawyers aren’t renowned for their sense of humour but I can’t help thinking someone, at the highest levels of our justice system, is having a right laugh at my expense and those who have loyally supported me over the past six years.

I’m talking about the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC – a sitting member of the Scottish Government’s cabinet who was nominated by Nicola Sturgeon to that post in 2021, five months after I was acquitted.

For those unfamiliar with my case, I offer this brief summary. In March 2020 I made a short video on my mobile phone that was two minutes and thirty eight seconds in length. I hadn’t planned to make the video when I went out for a walk in a field near my home. But I was annoyed and wanted to articulate that annoyance, although at the time I recorded it I wasn’t intending for it to go much further.

Later that night, just before turning in, I uploaded it to my YouTube channel on a closed, unlisted link and then posted that link to my Twitter account that, at the time, had a modest 1000 or so followers. I then forgot about it.

Little did I know that short mobile phone video would result in me facing initially a criminal trial, then a five year legal battle in the highest civil court in Scotland and now, most likely, an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

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So on the one hand there’s obviously very little point paying attention to the SNP’s regional list candidates for May’s Holyrood election, because as this website has comprehensively demonstrated over recent months, the chances of the SNP having any list MSPs elected are remote.

However, nothing is impossible, so let’s take a look at the B team, which also serves as a guide to the party’s upcoming talent taking its first steps towards the gravy bus.

Well, that was even grimmer than expected.

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Cost of keeping vital rape crisis services in Glasgow operating: £500,000.

Amount of money wasted by the Scottish Government fighting and losing court cases to try to remove women’s rights: £1.14 million.

Angry yet?

In politics, readers, evil and stupidity aren’t the same thing.

But nor are they exclusive.

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Readers will probably be aware that literally as you read this, the Scottish Government is in court trying to defend its policy of letting male murderers be housed in women’s prisons by arguing that the Equality Act 2010 (as ruled on by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland case) is incompatible with the Human Rights Act 1998, implementing the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly referred to as the ECHR).

But this article isn’t about that case.

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This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

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It’s almost – almost – worth voting SNP in May because of this:

Because it would be at least momentarily absolutely hilarious watching Swinney try to explain why his “100% guaranteed” second indyref didn’t happen if the SNP actually did get a majority on 30% of the vote (which is narrowly feasible on current polling).

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Scotland take on Haiti on Sunday 14 June (in the wee small hours of the morning), so this is nice, isn’t it?

At least, it would be if incompetent idiots weren’t in charge.

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Something very odd happened when the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal delivered its judgment – and it wasn’t just the made-up quotes and mangled law.

Call it institutional bias, ideological capture, or just the law doing its job, but what Employment Judge Sandy Kemp’s tribunal delivered was the most one-sided outcome since Butch and Sundance decided to come out shooting.

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This is absolutely extraordinary.

In the light of revelations exposed and detailed by Wings that the original contained several misleadingly-edited or completely made-up citations from previous cases, the Employment Tribunal today issued a corrected version of its judgment in the Sandie Peggie case. And much like NHS Fife’s repeatedly-edited previous statement on the tribunal, we suspect it’ll only be the first of many.

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One must assume from reading the Sandie Peggie judgment that the tribunal was more concerned with discouraging further litigation than with giving full and fearless effect to the Equality Act.

At the heart of this case lies a straightforward question: does a biologically male employee have a legal right to undress in a female-only changing room? For Women Scotland answered that question at the Supreme Court: women-only spaces are for biological women.

Yet instead of applying that binding precedent, the tribunal awarded Sandie Peggie a technical win based primarily on procedural failings and delay, while simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of her core complaint. The effect is a ruling that says: “You were treated badly, but only because you reacted to a situation we pretend has no legal significance.”

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