Wings Over Scotland

Just over a hundred years ago, the rights of women in the UK were still entirely decided by men. Women didn’t have the vote (a small minority would be given it in 1918, but most would have another decade to wait), there were no women in Parliament, and women basically had no say in anything that happened.

Record scratch and jump-cut to the present day.

That’s Kirsty Blackman, an SNP MP elected in 2015 who wouldn’t even have been allowed to stand for election a hundred years earlier, and who seems determined to take women’s rights back to that century.

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The First Minister released a short film this week.

While it has the character of a hostage video, with terrorists just off-camera pointing a gun at the unfortunate victim and forcing them to read out a pre-prepared text, sadly we doubt that was the case. We think this is really what she believes and intends.

And that’s all kinds of disturbing.

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We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.

He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.

(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)

So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.

And yet here we are.

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So-called “puberty blockers” – the class of drugs that were used to “chemically castrate” computing pioneer Alan Turing for being homosexual (a crime in the UK in the 1950s), which is believed to have led to his suicide by cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 are extremely dangerous.

The most common one nowadays is Lupron, which is used as a treatment/alternative punishment on rapists and paedophiles to reduce their offending by destroying their sexual function. It has not been tested for use on “transgender” children and nobody knows how much permanent damage it could do (although the likely answer is “a lot”), which is why the High Court in England ruled last year that children under the age of 16 were not medically competent to consent to such treatment.

Scotland’s only gender clinic, the Sandyford, had to apologise just a few months ago for having concealed the very serious hazards posed by the drugs. But it has no plans to stop prescribing them to under-16s.

And the Scottish Government refuses to intervene in the matter.

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Dr Malcolm Kerr joined the SNP in 1967, has contested local council and Scottish Parliament elections and is currently an activist in Cunninghame North constituency.

I’ve been a member of the SNP for long enough to recall the days when the party was capable of generating killer slogans. “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. “Independence – Nothing Less”. Those were the days!

Nothing describes the SNP’s descent towards being the new New Labour better than its choice of slogans in recent years. “Stronger for Scotland” serves only to flag up just how powerless the party’s large contingent at Westminster is. “Progress” is entirely meaningless.

And fellow activists and members may recall just how depressing it was to attend the most recent in-person spring Conference, when the leadership felt that the slogan “Hope” was going to be inspiring. When you’ve been in power for 14 years you’re supposed to DO things, not just hope for them.

We’re getting to the point where we should soon be Blairite enough to invade Iraq. Fortunately, we lack the means.

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Yesterday the SNP released their 2021 election manifesto, and on the divisive subject of gender reform it was as bad as we feared. Yes, there is obfuscation to mask intent, but the intent is crystal clear all the same. Especially if we judge the SNP by their record and all the things they have failed – and continued to fail – to address.

The manifesto commits to reforming the GRA while ensuring that it will not affect the rights or protections women enjoy under the Equality Act.

But what, in reality, does that mean?

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The latest group to come out in public defence of the ostensibly openly paedophiliac “Feminist Declaration” which was signed up to last year by a number of Scottish organisations is the “Rainbow Greens”.

The co-conveners of the Rainbow Greens are two men called Blair Anderson and Eilidh Martin. Let’s meet one of them, shall we?

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The furore over a declaration signed by a number of Scottish organisations which appears to clearly call for the age of sexual consent to be reduced to 10 continues today, with a couple of appallingly biased articles in the Scotsman and the Times which attempt to use the controversy to attack both the Alba Party (as a distraction from its powerful key manifesto release on women’s rights) and this website.

Even just the tweet above by the author of the Times piece fails all kinds of basic journalistic standards of impartiality, but the article itself is vastly worse.

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Not for the first time, a certain section of society in Scotland and elsewhere is today engaged in the furious insistence that words don’t mean what they actually mean.

The words above are not ambiguous. They call for the “elimination” of “all laws limiting [the] legal capacity of adolescents […] to consent to sex”. The only laws which limit the legal capacity of adolescents – people aged from 10 to 19, according to both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations – to consent to sex are age of consent laws. The clue is somewhat in the name.

If organisations don’t want those laws abolished so that 10-year-olds can have sex, then they shouldn’t sign their names to statements saying that they do.

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There’s something missing from this.

Can you spot it, readers?

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While watching reports from the Alba Party women’s conference that took place this afternoon, we saw something that we thought must be wrong.

But it wasn’t.

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…you’re not paying attention. Real images from last night’s SNP broadcast:

It’s not a cult, though. The whole thing can be seen here.