Wings Over Scotland

It’s now almost a year and a month since this website announced its cessation as a continuing endeavour, with the “final decision” clause being invoked four months later.

Since Wings confirmed its formal closure as a blog there have nevertheless been 19 posts in eight-and-a-half months, comprising a mixture of polls (the site’s remaining purpose), guest posts, admin, a couple of throwaway joke videos and very occasional one-off, polling-related comment pieces on significant occasions like the SNP marking 15 years in power or Nicola Sturgeon becoming the longest-serving First Minister.

So it’s a little bit startling that it’s still – and by a considerable distance – the world’s most-read Scottish politics site.

(In fact, bigger than the next three put together.)

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This was overdue an update. Two extra rows now added.

(Click for full size image with legible dates. Landscape version here.)

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This is getting properly embarrassing.

Because that starting gun must be red-hot by now.

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We’re still retired, but this just can’t go unremarked.

This is absolute banana-republic stuff. Even before you get into any of the specifics of the case, it’s simply not the Crown Office’s job to interfere with a police investigation by telling them who they may and may not interview under caution.

Scottish justice is extremely seriously compromised.

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15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

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To: Humza Yousaf (Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care), Shirley-Anne Somerville (Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills) and Clare Haughey (Minister for Children and Young People)

28 April 2022

Dear Mr Yousaf, Ms Somerville and Ms Haughey,

Cass Interim Report: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – Implications for Scotland

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…to all the pathetic, craven, cowardly excuses for politicians in both Scotland and the UK who think that they can blithely keep doing TV interviews and radio call-ins where they dodge the question of what a woman is all the way up to the next election, and thereby knowingly facilitate the criminal mutilation and sterilisation of children and the sexual abuse of vulnerable women in hospitals, prisons and rape refuges.

I am living for the day when someone in the Scottish media finds some courage from somewhere and asks Nicola Sturgeon, because she’s going to blink so fast her face might catch fire. But that phone will just keep on ringing until someone answers.

The trans-sex-role-stereotype movement has put what would have been concealed and kept behind closed doors on centre stage. This is why normal, decent men look aghast at other men’s behaviour while many women sigh with an ‘oh, this again’.

The woke bloke contempt for women is clear and abusive behaviours are on full display. Reading through Lundy Bancroft’s pivotal work “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men”, the full cast of characters is present on Twitter, in the news and in our political parties and institutions.

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Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?

“At no point, while I was coming to terms with how my [severely disabled] daughter’s future was set to unfold, did I expect to find myself in a position where I would be forced to remind my elected representatives about something as basic as my vulnerable daughter’s need for same-sex care.

Anxieties about her having to endure acts of negligence, or maybe even cruelty, at the hands of an unprofessional person, once I am gone, have haunted some of my sleepless nights. However, I have been consoled with the knowledge that regulations and safeguarding policies would be in place to offer her protection from bad actors.

But what happens when somewhere along the line the differences between the sexes become artificially blurred, and the safeguarding that was in place can no longer be relied upon because of proposed reforms to current law?”

The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse.

We just don’t seem to care.

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We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.

So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.

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I’ve just remembered that I meant to leave this pinned to the front page when I shut Wings down as a blog, so here it is. It’s just a short one.

I am willing to bet anyone in the UK any amount of money of their choosing that there will NOT be a second independence referendum in Scotland while Nicola Sturgeon is First Minister.

If you still believe she’ll deliver one, now’s your chance to demonstrate your faith in public AND get yourself some free cash. (It’s a matter of public record that I’ve never failed to pay up on a losing wager.)

So come on, SNP loyalists and true believers, let’s see you. Put your name and the amount you want to bet in the comments below* and let’s find out how much you really trust her. This is an entirely genuine, serious offer and remains open to anyone** until such times as Nicola Sturgeon stands down as First Minister, even if that’s 20 years from now. Any amount you like. I’m waiting keenly for your responses.

.

*PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT EXCEPT TO TAKE THE BET.

**WAGERS FROM GERRY “THE WELCHER” HASSAN NOT ACCEPTED.

When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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