Wings Over Scotland

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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It’s 18C today in Bath, readers, so after the dentist we went out to enjoy the sunshine for the afternoon. And you know what happens when we go out.

But really, what even is there to say?

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Readers may have noticed recent speculation in the media (based on the wording of a press release) that Police Scotland had ended their investigations regarding Operation Branchform. As it happened we’d already submitted a Freedom Of Information request aimed at finding that out, and the response arrived this evening.

You can read it below.

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Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.

You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).

We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.

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Peter Murrell really ought to have seen the writing on the wall a while ago.

But at least it’s in keeping with her track record.

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The Scottish Government just issued another response in the long-running Freedom Of Information battle with alert Wings reader Benjamin Harrop over its conspiracy to frame and imprison the late Alex Salmond on false charges. Here’s a genuine extract.

Yeah, definitely nothing to hide here.

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You’ve got to admit, that’s a zinger.

Craig Whyte is a man who knows all about financial doom looming on the horizon of a once-powerful institution. But it doesn’t take an expert with lived experience to spot what’s coming down the line for the SNP.

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Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.

When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.

And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.

Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.

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As we write this article, Sandy Brindley (on the left of the picture below) is still in post as the CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland.

For as long as that remains the case, rape victims in Scotland will not be safe.

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