Dear Nicola,
I write to express to you the views of many people in Scotland. Our movement is very upset by the actions they currently see unfolding before them.
These actions are the direct responsibility of your staff, your officials and your advisers. And therefore, ultimately, you.
The Scottish Government and Nicola Sturgeon have tonight embarked on a last-ditch desperate throw of the dice to undermine and sabotage the already-compromised and endlessly-obstructed Fabiani inquiry in its impossible quest for the truth.
Having previously deployed her paid mouthpiece Rape Crisis Scotland last week, the First Minister – who’s spent the last six months insisting that she’d save her comments for her appearance at the inquiry – suddenly popped up on BBC and STV (but not, curiously, Sky News) to issue a challenge full of gunfighter bravado to her predecessor.
Two days ago this website published a leaked draft version of the SNP’s definition of “transphobia” which was debated at a meeting of its National Executive Committee on Saturday. The party has now published (for members only) the final agreed version, which is essentially identical to the draft except for a few tweaks.
But one of them is very significant.
The highlighted part was not in the draft, and it amounts to an explicit and absolutely terrifying redesignation of basic human biology as a hate crime.
It’s difficult to know where to even start on the absolutely extraordinary reaction to our post about yesterday’s meeting of the SNP National Executive Committee. Our traffic exploded to levels not seen since 2014, racking up tens of thousands of pageviews an hour, and social media was aflame with argument into the small hours of the morning.
A whole raft of issues arose from our exclusive revelations, but the one we want to talk about now is the one that was buried at the bottom of what a panicked SNP hastily and laughably produced as the “minutes” of the meeting, and we didn’t even notice it until a couple of hours after the original post.
We’ve just been sent this report from today’s meeting of the SNP’s National Executive Committee, which ended a short time ago. There’s no official confirmation yet but it’s come to us from several independent sources and we’re sure it’s true.
(“NS” and “JC” are of course Nicola Sturgeon and Joanna Cherry.)
We couldn’t see any other outcome than this as soon as the decision was passed to the SPCB, because the Unionist parties have the majority of votes on it.
So it looks as though the Scottish Government’s desperate stalling is finally at an end, and two months after it was supposed to have happened we’re all about to have a very interesting day indeed. We can’t wait.
While we wait for this story to unfold:
Let’s catch up on a few things. Scottish politics is moving very fast at the moment, and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss stuff.
Lady Dorrian’s full judgement and reasoning in respect of last week’s hearing involving The Spectator has been published on the Scottish Courts website.
It contains nothing that those who listened in on the case by telephone last week didn’t hear for themselves – it’s simply an 11-page summary of what was debated in court and casts no new light on what Lady Dorrian said at the time.
We’ll be very interested to see whether or not The Spectator – or perhaps more to the point its lawyers, who we must presume had vetted and cleared the initial publication just as Alex Salmond’s lawyers had – now feels able to restore the redacted paragraph that it removed after what it can now be publicly revealed was a threat from the Crown Office (a threat also received by this website).
The magazine’s response today is non-committal on the subject.
While it is this site’s belief that the paragraph in question DOES NOT identify anyone as a complainer – the Crown Office has not communicated which “other evidence” it feels could be combined with the paragraph, which makes no reference whatsoever to the criminal case, to provide identification – the restoration of the missing paragraph would certainly appear to provide circumstantial evidence to that effect, something which would be entirely due to the intervention of the Crown Office.
But overall, the needless delay in publishing this document has merely run down the clock on the inquiry by another week – time that it can ill afford – without providing any real additional clarity.
(We’re a bit puzzled as to why The Spectator’s counsel appears to have given up so easily on the second element of their application, which sought to specifically permit the publication of both Salmond and Geoff Aberdein’s written evidence.)
The fact that the judgement wasn’t released yesterday probably means, at a minimum, no more evidence sessions until next week, as the committee generally only meets on Tuesdays. We hope that doesn’t become a crucial issue, but we fear that the written judgement is sufficiently tepid that the crooked SNP members of the committee, and the spineless Andy Wightman, will use it to justify rejecting Salmond’s evidence and therefore hearing from him in person, rendering the entire undertaking moot anyway.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
