Wings Over Scotland

When I was a boy at Balbardie Primary School in Bathgate in the mid-70s, football was banned in the playground. Of course we were all fitba-daft laddies, so we sought ways around the prohibition. Occasionally someone would bring in a tennis ball, but those were difficult to control in school shoes and also apt to fly over the wall of the outdoor toilet block if somebody caught one sweetly on the volley.

So most playtimes somebody would produce a tin of Pepsi or Irn-Bru or Cresta, chug the contents, stand the empty container on its end and stomp sharply on it, producing something more akin to an ice-hockey puck that would serve for our kickabout.

But even after being skelped and scudded around a concrete playground into stone walls for 20 minutes, that can was still in better shape at the end of our game than the one the SNP have been kicking down the road since 2016.

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If you’re still falling for this idiot-fodder after seven years, give yourself a shake.

Because for the love of Christ, an orangutan would have twigged by now. And we’re not talking about the long-suffering fans of Dundee United.

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Just over a year ago, Shona Robison – then the Cabinet Secretary For Social Justice, now the Deputy First Minister – told the Scottish Parliament this:

There now follow some quotes from the media regarding the case of Andrew Miller, aka Amy George, who yesterday admitted the kidnap and repeated sexual abuse of an 11-year-old girl at his home in Galashiels earlier this year.

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This is where Scottish politics is now.

And it’s a properly grim state of affairs, readers.

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Below is a clip from last night’s ITV News West Country.

It really needs a wider audience.

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Alert Wings readers will have noticed recent press coverage of events surrounding North Lanarkshire Council, centred around a scandal of sexual harassment by former council leader Jordan Linden.

Here we present the full story, directly from one of the SNP councillors involved.

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Humza Yousaf has now been the First Minister of Scotland for a month.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, as they say in Kirkcudbright.

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Last week the property-porn TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp described severely disabled people requesting same-sex care as “demonising male nurses”, although the statistics suggest that they’ve demonised themselves.

That charities have had to develop a way for severely disabled children who may have mental ages of six to eight to say “willy”, “hard” and “squirt’’ evidences the widespread nature of the sexual abuse of the vulnerable and who is most likely to do it.

Instead of trying to understand the position of disabled individuals and their families Kirstie has decided that it is best to ignore the evidence and call us man-haters.

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Alert readers may recall our last foray into Freedom Of Information requests, when a couple of weeks ago we belatedly received a peculiarly evasive response from Police Scotland with regard to a meeting in February between the then-Chief Constable, Deputy Chief Constable and the justice secretary Keith Brown.

We duly followed it up with an FOI to the Scottish Government for Keith Brown’s official diary on that day – just about the most mundane, run-of-the-mill request possible. We expected nothing remarkable, just a short list of meetings, fully corroborating what we were told by Police Scotland.

What we got was rather more intriguing.

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As the SNP burns down around their ears, nothing stops the gravy bus. But even as they gallivant gaily around another “Tartan Week” junket in the USA, one might have thought the Constitution Minister would have shied away from this particular photo-op.

Let’s find out why.

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So let’s just recap where we are with this.

Because it really doesn’t look very good.

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In June of last year, I started work at Transport Scotland. It wasn’t the best job I’ve ever had. It was pretty much an entry-level post and it was only a temp gig through an agency, but after spending almost six years out of the workforce following a bout with cancer, two frozen shoulders, and chronic knee and hip pain, it was a huge relief just to be earning my keep again.

Of course, June is Pride Month, and Saltire (the Scottish Government’s intranet) was full of news and blogs about “LGBTI+” issues.

Also on the Saltire front page was a prominent invitation to two training sessions to understand the issues facing these groups: “LGBT+ Awareness 101” and “Trans 101”.

These were both run by the LGBTI+ Network, one of several “affinity networks” for civil servants belonging to different groups. With the GRR Bill on the horizon, and having heard stories about how difficult it had been for gender critical groups to get a hearing from the Government in relation to it, I was very curious to hear what this training involved, and I signed up to attend via Teams.

The first session was “LGBT+ Awareness 101”. This session was fairly inoffensive. The content regarding gay people was about what you would expect, and the T+ stuff was clearly biased, but not terrible.

However, the tone of the event suggested quite strongly that you weren’t meant to disagree with anything that was said. Towards the end, when questions were invited, I typed my question into the chat:

“How does the Scottish Government handle conflicts between TERFs and trans people?”

And there my troubles began.

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