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.
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.
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.
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.”
We’re just putting this here for the record, really.
It’s a “debate” from the Scottish Parliament last night, on a motion from Patrick Harvie complaining that vulnerable children aren’t being pushed into a programme of lifelong medicalisation, sterilisation and mutilation quickly enough.
The motion completely ignored both the findings of the Cass Review and the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland, but not a single MSP spoke in opposition to it. (Jenni Minto, the Minister For Public Health And Women’s Health, actually broke down in tears at the end because she wasn’t managing to get children’s futures permanently destroyed with sufficient urgency, mainly because the UK Parliament took legislation out of Holyrood’s hands to protect them.)
The list of those who spoke in favour of child harm was:
Patrick Harvie (Scottish Greens)
Paul McLennan (SNP)
Mercedes Villalba (Labour)
Maggie Chapman (Scottish Greens)
Elena Whitham (SNP)
Monica Lennon (Lab)
Rona Mackay (SNP)
Jenni Minto (SNP)
We hope one day they’re held publicly accountable for their actions.
To be honest, we’re mainly putting these here so you don’t have to keep looking at that picture of Alan Cumming.
But they also show what you can achieve, whether in football or politics, if you actually attack rather than being content to endlessly shuttle it all sideways and backwards until you get beaten without even taking a shot.
We’re important!
Something to look forward to there, then.
Perhaps the key graphic from last night’s by-election in Caerphilly is this one (green means Plaid Cymru in the context of Wales):
In the end, Plaid won pretty comfortably in what had been predicted to be a very tight contest between them and Reform, with a majority of almost 4,000. But Plaid aren’t going to be the next government of the UK, so what’s the real story?
Last month, when half a football team of armed police ambushed and arrested comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport for a couple of tweets, we said this:
Today, even more swiftly than we thought, this happened:
Rarely can a hand have been overplayed so badly.
We should point out right at the start that a reader donated £12 back in the summer specifically to send us to Nicola Sturgeon’s book event in Bath last night.
We assume it was someone we’d upset in some way.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
