Wings Over Scotland

We suppose we should talk about the general election for a bit.

It’s going to be awful. Will that do?

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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 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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The picture editor of The Times must have been delighted with this gift.

But it’s a very accurate picture, and fairly used.

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Well, what a nice statement of unity and tolerance this is:

And only slightly undermined by coming from THIS guy:

But Smith’s new message of tolerance hasn’t fully penetrated the party ranks.

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Comment seems superfluous, really.

So we’ll just make a couple of the obvious points for the sake of it and then we’re off to the park.

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So that was a big waste of everyone’s time.

We’re not sure why John Swinney made a big show of dragging all his ministers away from their desks to Bute House today in order to tell them nothing had changed. All he’s done is give Kate Forbes the smallest possible sliver of Shona Robison’s job and everything else has stayed the same.

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We watched a TV documentary about the sinking of the Bismarck last week.

The most striking aspect of it was the visible and audible distress on the faces and in the voices of some of the Royal Navy sailors who’d been on the ships which sent the German battleship to the Atlantic seabed as they told the story of the final battle.

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We were going to write a follow-up piece to this last week, until the SNP detonated a hand-grenade in its own trouser pocket. But with the coronation of John Swinney this afternoon after the only challenger sold out for some shiny beads and trinkets, we can get back to some serious news.

The controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which has been involved in a number of serious child sexual abuse scandals, continues to exert considerable influence on Scotland’s education system, thanks to extremely lavish funding from taxpayers – well over a million pounds from hard-pressed councils in the last year alone to address unspecified issues whose urgency is difficult to identify.

After our last piece we sent LGBTYS a letter raising our concerns about their improper interference with primary schools, something we were obliged to do before we could file a formal complaint with Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR.

We received an automated reply on 24 April saying “We are currently experiencing staff shortages and it may take up to a week to respond to your email.”

That deadline expired five days ago, and we will now be writing to the OSCR. But in the meantime LGBTYS persists in exceeding its remit, with deeply alarming results.

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We’ve already posted a shorter and snappier soundbite from this video on our Twitter, but it’s really worth watching the full version here:

Because the body language is remarkable. For three and a half minutes, Neil Gray is completely unable to look his former colleague – an SNP MSP until a few months ago, a fellow government minister until 2022 –  in the eye.

He sits stiff as a board, his teeth gritted, his face like thunder, staring directly ahead at the back wall of the studio as Ash Regan patiently and calmly outlines the extremely modest requirements Alba had set out in return for supporting Humza Yousaf and the SNP government in Parliamentary votes of confidence.

And when host Stephen Jardine asks him what exactly was so unreasonable about them, he can’t help himself, and blurts out that it was really all about preventing Alex Salmond from regaining any sort of influence on Scottish politics and insisting that his “rehabilitation” could not be permitted, even if the result of blocking it was the loss of an SNP First Minister and the potential bringing down of an SNP government.

And at this point a fair-minded person might ask: rehabilitation from what, precisely?

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