Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland’s press this morning that despite her weariness, she could have managed a few more months or even a year as First Minister, which would at least have got her halfway to keeping her promise to serve a full term if she was elected in 2021.
Which just makes her timing all the harder to explain.
We’ve just had the results back from some very interesting new polling, and the first snippet is a particularly instructive one.
When challenged on questions of gender, the reflex response of politicians of most parties in the Scottish Parliament is to bang on about how overwhelmingly MSPs voted for the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
Curiously, so far no journalist has bothered to ask whether they care that according to every poll, they’re utterly failing to represent the views of their constituents on the subject – which is, after all, what they’re supposed to be there for.
So we just asked directly if people felt their MSPs were doing their jobs.
Ouch. By well over 2 to 1, respondents felt that they were being let down by the people who are supposed to speak for them. (Excluding DKs the margin is just shy of 70/30, very similar to the margin by which people in polls oppose self-ID generally.)
But it’s when you drill down into the detail that it gets a bit disturbing.
Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:
Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.
Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.
But isn’t that the Scottish Greens co-leader in that picture, in the bunnet, between his colleague Ross Greer and Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, all enthusiastically clapping Douglas just a few weeks ago?
The title of this article might sound a bit like the name of a band making their debut at Glastonbury this year, but in fact it’s something infinitely more serious.
News broke late last night that the person we must presumably now refer to as an “individual” who had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of a missing Galashiels schoolgirl (happily found safe and well and back home with her parents) had in fact been charged with an as-yet-unspecified crime.
But the alleged crime wasn’t the only thing going unspecified.
After Wings’ investigation into the disturbing world of “furries” earlier this week, the mainstream press picked up on the quite extraordinary decision by SNP MSP Christina McKelvie to endorse a “counter-protest” being organised by the costume fetishists against a women’s-rights event in Glasgow tomorrow.
Because it appears the SNP are more and more openly throwing their weight behind both extreme sexual kink (and worse) and the intimidation of women.
Yet even after our extensive revelations about his past last week, not a single MSP has disassociated themselves from him. And now we find ourselves in a position whereby in order to protect other women, we’re forced to direct people’s attention to something we really wish we didn’t have to.
On January 22nd the violent, abusive transgender activist Jack Douglas, who now uses the name Beth and the Twitter username “pickle_bee” (slang for “somebody who likes dick”), threatened that feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s imminent “Standing For Women” event in Glasgow was going to be disrupted by the “furry” community, who happen to be hosting a gathering at the Crowne Plaza that same weekend.
“Why? What possible grudge could furries have against women?”, a friend giggled, as I related this news to her. But to answer that we have to know who these people are.
