There comes a point when even the most liberal and tolerant have to ask questions.
The above clip comes from a 2022 fundraising dinner celebrating the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence. But Anas Sarwar seems to want to take things a little bit further than that.
At the weekend, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman was filmed applauding as a notoriously unhinged transactivist ranted through a megaphone to a small and almost exclusively male crowd of protestors about how he was going to openly break the law by continuing to use women’s public toilets, and addressing JK Rowling with the words “We should all take a shite on you, you heinous creeping old bitch”.
At another protest, Chapman herself asserted that the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was motivated by not by a solemn consideration of the law or by the arguments of counsel who appeared before it, but by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.
Chapman is – incredibly – Deputy Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, and as such her comments sparked a storm of wholly justified outrage over her flagrant breach not only of Parliamentary rules but also of the law – specifically the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which requires all MSPs to uphold the independence of the judiciary.
But Chapman today refused to back down.
And the call for consequences has grown far beyond the usual suspects.
Well, it’s always nice to be a landmark for free speech.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Alert readers will have noticed our so-far-fruitless attempts to extract information from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator regarding the disturbing activities of the controversy-plagued LGBT Youth Scotland.
We are far from the only people raising concerns about the charity – we know of at least 17 separate formal complaints against LGBTYS in the past year alone, yet the OSCR has declined to open any sort of formal inquiry into them. (It carried out three such inquiries in 2024.)
But despite the OSCR’s assertion that “we strive to be transparent and accountable”, when we went to find those complaints (including, of course, the one from ourselves) to link you to them, we hit a brick wall that rapidly turned into a whole new concern.
So as promised, and having now spent 11 months trying to get answers any other way, this afternoon we had a live chat with controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
Below is how it went.
In April last year we wrote to LGBT Youth Scotland asking them to explain why they were conducting activities in primary schools (and even with pre-school children) about sexual matters despite only having a remit to work with young people aged 13-25.
We received no reply, so we contacted the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, who sent a rather sniffy acknowledgement saying:
“If your concern leads us to making inquiries with the charity, we are unable to update you on the status of those inquiries. For more information about what to expect after you submit a concern, read our guidance on how OSCR deals with concerns and inquiries.”
That link, you’ll be amazed to hear, leads to a dead page.
Much of Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK and beyond (the story below ran in the London Standard), has been grimly gripped this week by the ongoing and scarcely believable trainwreck that is Sandie Peggie Vs NHS Fife.
The tribunal has now overrun the time allotted to it, and will reconvene for another 10 days in the second half of July, ramping up the already considerable costs incurred by NHS Fife, which is in the middle of a huge financial crisis.
According to legal experts, there is little doubt about the law surrounding the dispute. NHS Fife is clearly and unambiguously in the wrong – Dr Beth Upton, the transwoman at the centre of the problem, is legally as well as biologically male, and had no lawful entitlement to be in a female changing room. The authority also appears to be in very considerable potential trouble over failing to disclose key documents and evidence when ordered by the original judge.
So it seems remarkable that the board of NHS Fife is allowing the case to continue rather than immediately conceding to save money and any more public humiliation of both itself and its staff, like the hapless nurse manager Esther Davidson who endured a very uncomfortable two days in the witness box this week, and the clearly manifestly incompetent Equality And Human Rights Lead Officer, Isla Bumba, who yesterday deleted her LinkedIn page after being identified as the person who gave Davidson incorrect and unlawful guidance.
(Bumba is a 29-year-old immunology graduate and former bartender who ditched the challenging and gruelling field of vaccine development for a rather cushier number in pronoun-policing for £40-47,000 a year, somewhat more than the £31,000 average wage for staff nurses like Sandie Peggie, who’s been in the profession for longer than Bumba has been alive.)
Readers may reasonably wonder if the makeup of the board might offer some clues.
We’ll give you three guesses as to the highly controversial and extravagantly taxpayer-funded organisation that has its rainbow fingerprints all over this story, readers.
But you’re going to have two to spare.
Everyone even remotely connected to Scottish politics has known for months that the below is the case. It’s an open secret.
But what’s playing out right now is something much bigger than the fate of one or two or three individuals. It’s the entire future of the credibility of Scotland’s justice system.
Astonishingly, there isn’t a single word of apology anywhere in this statement.
There isn’t a scintilla of contrition, not the tiniest glimmer of admission of culpability or responsibility. There isn’t even a weasel-worded expression of “regret”.
Rape Crisis Scotland is unfit for purpose, and its CEO must resign.
In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, performed a pair of amputations on two men. Neither of the men involved had anything physically wrong with them, but both were suffering from apotemnophilia – a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to have healthy limbs amputated.
Sufferers, counterintuitively, claim not to feel “whole” with four limbs and obsess over having their unwanted body parts chopped off. Smith argued the surgeries were life-saving, claiming the patients would commit suicide otherwise.
Apotemnophiles, like autogynephiles, insist that there is no erotic element, but it was later discovered that one of the men Smith operated on ran an amputee fetish website.
Upon investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical. Smith was banned from mutilating healthy bodies (although he was found not to have breached any of the hospital’s rules at the time and not sanctioned), and the dubious experiment ended.
But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality.
This sounds like good news, doesn’t it?
But in fact the headline on the STV News website – whether intentionally, through innocent misunderstanding or, as we suspect, a result of being deliberately misled by government ministers – is a flat-out lie.
In fact the Scottish Government has done the exact opposite. It has taken Dr Hilary Cass’s four-year report and set it on fire, so that it can continue to irreversibly destroy the lives of Scottish children in the name of gender ideology.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
