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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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?

As the six-year fight for justice for Alex Salmond continues, we thought you might like to see this clip from this morning’s Mike Graham Show, interviewing Paul McManus, the businessman and drummer in Glasgow rock band Gun who’s stepped up to fund the Salmond family’s case against the Scottish Government despite disagreeing with much of what Alex stood for politically.

We take our (hi-)hats off to him.

My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.

Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.

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On 5 April 2021, I sent a short and simple Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to the Scottish Government asking for:

“All written evidence to James Hamilton’s QC investigation into the FM under the ministerial code. This includes evidence from the FM, her chief of staff Liz Lloyd and any other individuals within the Scottish Government who have submitted evidence.”

Over four and a half years later, because of the government’s pathological aversion to transparency and accountability, we’re still not there.

But we’re inching closer.

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For several years now, this site has recorded how the SNP’s continued existence is now entirely dependent on UK state funding. The party would simply go bust without Westminster money. And how precarious a position that puts it in is sharply illustrated by the latest release of donations income from the Electoral Commission.

In a 12-month period running up to the last UK general election, the UK state gave the SNP a little over £1.3 million.

In the corresponding period for the last year, after the party was reduced to just nine seats, that figure plunged to just over £0.4 million, a drop of over £0.9 million.

And that’s money the SNP can’t afford to lose.

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Kevin McKenna has a piece in today’s Herald asking the question that is now the core issue for the Scottish independence movement.

The short version of the answer is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled”. But that does nothing to explain the fool’s mindset to us, or help devise a way to get them to accept it.

To some degree that’s because – as we saw so starkly in the “NO DEBATE!” tactics of the gender ideologly cult – part of the problem is that the built-in defence mechanism of the fooled is something George Orwell described in “1984”:

“CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”

What that means in practice is that the fooled never reflect on their own behaviour, far less enter into a meaningful discussion of it. In Orwell’s dystopian Oceania, that was to save them from torture and death at the hands of the Thought Police. More often nowadays, it’s simply to avoid humiliation on social media.

Either way, it’s vanishingly rare to hear someone elaborate on why they’re choosing to remain fooled. Which is why we’re so lucky today.

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Over the last week or so we’ve gone into several sections of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir “Frankly” in some detail: what gender she really thinks Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham is, blaming JK Rowling for the toxic tone of the self-ID debate and explaining how she thinks the law should be changed to let transwomen into women’s spaces in future, her unquenchable jealousy of Alex Salmond and her failure to understand the basic functioning of the Scottish justice system, and finally her laughable denial of her evil but incompetent conspiracy against her predecessor.

(All of which she chose to accompany with a series of photographs that made her look like a sinister Cockney chav crime matriarch in a Guy Ritchie movie. She once dubbed herself Scotland’s “chief mammy”, but now comes across more like Ma Baker.)

But we’ve only just finished reading the whole book, so here’s the actual review.

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So this snuck out quietly at the bottom of page 2 of today’s Daily Record.

And like, we suspect, most of Scotland, our response was “WHAT?”

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet, scammers used to have to work a bit harder to cheat people than they do now.

A popular method was to advertise a “clearance sale” in the press. You’d see an ad in the Daily Record or a local paper for an event in a High Street location – typically a vacant shop – promising brand-new TVs for £20, microwaves for a fiver, toasters for £2.50 or whatever. So you’d show up on the day and it always worked the same.

There’d be the ringmaster on a raised platform, surrounded by loads of unmarked white boxes, and he’d start off by picking some “random” punter from the crowd and bestowing gifts upon him. This guy would walk away with armfuls of swag for £25 or something (doubtless just going straight round the back with them), and the real show would begin.

Next the ringmaster would say “Now, before we get properly started, who’ll give me £10 for what’s on my mind?” (that phrase, “what’s on my mind”, was always the same). And basically they were flogging a mystery box, invariably containing a few trashy trinkets worth a fraction of the cost.

Any chump who bought one would then be escorted out of the shop before opening it, on the pretence that the bargains on offer in these sales were so great that they were limited to one per person. (There was always security on the door, sometimes even cops. There’s nothing intrinsically illegal about selling mystery boxes, even mainstream chainstores still do it today.)

And that was basically it. The ringmaster would delay and delay, punting more mystery boxes and never actually getting to the bit where you could buy a specific item at a specific price, and after a couple of hours the event would close down and the would-be customers would disperse in disgruntlement.

Now here’s John Swinney.

He’s got a mystery box to sell you.

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Alert readers will be familiar with this site’s ongoing quest for an explanation as to why controversy-plagued charity LGBT Youth Scotland continues to operate in dozens of Scottish primary and even nursery schools, pushing gender ideology onto children as young as four despite only having a remit to support 13-25-year-olds.

Last month we were, to coin a phrase, stonewalled by Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR, but we filed a review request and today we received – a couple of weeks past the deadline – a response.

Below is a quick video of it.

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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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