Wings Over Scotland

It will come as little surprise to any observer of the Scottish media for the last decade that the trial of Alex Salmond is to continue indefinitely after the actual court case that cleared him of all charges.

With very occasional honourable exceptions, including some from rather unexpected sources, the Scottish press has been – even by its own spectacularly low standards – an absolute sewer for the past week. Wings has taken the decision not to link to any of the most disgusting articles, even as archives, because frankly in the current stressful situation none of us needs any extra poison in our headspace.

Scotland’s political journalists have been unable to contain their seething fury at being robbed of the head on a pike that they were all expecting and salivating about like Pavlov’s dogs. But scumbags are gonna scumbag, and that’s not news. What’s far more alarming is something in today’s papers that they didn’t write.

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Today a mostly-female jury drawn from the most Unionist city in Scotland and directed by a female judge delivered the only verdict it was credibly possible to reach on the (total absence of) evidence before it: that Alex Salmond was not guilty of any crime.

After two weeks hearing an assortment of lurid allegations from former friends and colleagues hidden behind cloaks of public anonymity, the jury – having been advised by the prosecuting counsel that they were the sole arbiters of fact – decided that there was no truth to them.

Since the two most serious charges, in particular, were both matters of the accuser’s word against that of the accused, and the two parties gave completely irreconcilable accounts of the facts (rather than competing interpretations of agreed events), it can only be the case that one side was lying absolutely, and the jury decided that it was the anonymous accusers who were doing so.

It remains to see whether there will be a legal reckoning for those lies. But more than one sort of reckoning will surely follow from these events.

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There are now exactly two weeks remaining of the Scottish Government’s second fake “consultation” into its proposed reforms to gender law.

We say “fake” not out of cynicism or mad paranoia, but because the cabinet minister responsible for the reforms has already made it explicitly, publicly and repeatedly clear that she intends to press ahead with them regardless of the responses, and that the only purpose of the “consultation” is to try to persuade people to agree with them.

Shirley-Anne Somerville reiterated this position just days ago, telling Scotland Tonight that she was “absolutely determined” to enact the bill and only interested in silencing opposition and removing any “medicalisation” of the process of gender transition.

While the Scottish Government has met literally hundreds of times with transactivist groups with regard to the reforms, it has refused to meet women’s groups critical of them, and frequently lied about that refusal.

(It also funds transactivist pressure groups with hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money to create a “feedback loop” supporting its position. Gender-critical women’s groups receive no such funding, largely because the conditions attached to Scottish Government funding specifically and deliberately exclude them.)

The consultation document and the draft bill leave enormous logical and legislative gaps which are likely to cause untold chaos if the reforms are implemented. The Scottish Government has apparently learned nothing from the shambolic fiascos around the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act and Named Person legislation, both of which have collapsed despite widespread public support – something the proposed gender reforms emphatically do NOT enjoy.

We’re obliged for the sake of sanity to assume that at some point the First Minister, the Cabinet Secretary or both will have to undertake at least one proper interview on the subject of these extremely serious and potentially catastrophic proposals.

For the consideration of whoever may conduct these interviews, we submit below some questions which a very considerable number of people in Scotland – primarily but by no means exclusively women, and encompassing a majority of every political and social demographic – urgently want answered.

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Less than 10 months ago:

Record scratch, jump cut to the present day:

Let’s just hear that again.

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We couldn’t help but raise a quizzical eyebrow at this assertion from SNP MP Pete Wishart in today’s Sunday National.

It was said in the specific context of securing a second indyref in 2020, and since such a referendum has NOT in fact been secured – and looks extremely unlikely to be – we wondered which other definition of “success” might be being used to justify the claim.

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Yesterday we posted an article noting that hardline trans-rights extremists, among whose number we must regretfully count the Scottish Government, were engaged in a determined and alarmingly successful attempt to abolish the scientific basis for reality.

We did not expect such a striking illustration of that assertion to arrive this soon.

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It really is quite the remarkable feat of timing that concerted mass reporting by SNP activists managed to get the Wings Twitter account (and several others) closed down this week of all weeks, isn’t it?

They’re also trying to get my personal account banned, and reporting scores of others, in an open attempt to purge any sort of dissenting opinions from public dialogue at exactly the same time as opening a “consultation” whose outcome has already been predetermined, and which in another remarkable coincidence is due to close just a few days into the four weeks scheduled for the Alex Salmond trial.

What were the odds, eh readers?

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Last night the SNP ditched its second office-bearing member in a week for supposed “anti-Semitism”. Both were thrown under the bus days before a general election for comments deemed to have compared the actions of the government of Israel to those of the Nazis during WW2, which is contrary to the definition of the term used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The specific line that both were deemed to have infringed was “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” – although interestingly the SNP has never publicly confirmed that it’s actually signed up to the definition, and the super-woke Greens haven’t adopted it either.

The suspensions of Neale Hanvey and Denise Findlay were triggered by the actions of supporters of two SNP politicians who have recently been very vocal about supposed “cybernat abuse” – MEP Alyn Smith and MP Stewart McDonald, both pictured below.

And some alert readers had questions.

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Particularly alert readers may recall this excellent documentary from 2017, exposing how Labour’s PFI scandal has cost the Scottish taxpayer countless billions of pounds and crippled local government for decades with its extortionate financial legacy, as illustrated by the case of North Ayrshire.

Well, now there’s another one of it.

The title is self-explanatory, and it’s worth half an hour of your time.

This is a tweet today from Allan Sutherland, a prominent No activist (he’s currently co-ordinating an attempt to unseat Ian Blackford in Ross, Skye and Lochaber via Unionist tactical voting) and regular fixture of the letters pages of all Scottish newspapers.

The tweet literally incites – indeed, implores – not one but two very serious criminal offences. (His Twitter account also includes such satirical gems as tweeting a video of the First Minister’s speech on Saturday with the voice of Adolf Hitler dubbed over it.)

The tweet comes days after a Scottish Labour candidate tweeted a meme depicting someone spraying bleach on SNP MP Joanna Cherry with the caption “BANG! and the terf is gone”, despite said candidate being supported by the Jo Cox Foundation – a charity set up after the Labour MP of that name was murdered with a gun.

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Alert readers will recall that among the many tirades of abuse this site has recently been subjected to for suggesting the idea of a 2021 Holyrood list party to compete for seats currently won by Unionists, one of the main themes was “We already have a reliable pro-indy alternative to the SNP in the form of the Scottish Greens”.

Now, that argument misses the point by the hugest distance imaginable, but let’s not get into it here, because something more important is happening much sooner.

As we approach a 2019 Westminster general election in which the number of pro-indy MPs returned could be absolutely crucial, we were alerted to the number of candidates the Scottish Greens are intending to stand this coming December.

So it’s perhaps worth considering the possible consequences.

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