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.
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.
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?”
This is the second time Wings Over Scotland has asked Police Scotland a question through the proper official channels, only to read the response in the tabloid press before we’d heard it firsthand (which we still haven’t, incidentally, several days after the 28-day deadline expired).
But the sidebar piece in today’s Sunday Mail raises more questions than it answers.
According to SNP President and acting CEO Mike Russell, SNP members are too thick to understand the concept of changing their vote, and integrity is “disruptive”.
We’re not very clear on why a revote would be susceptible to “hacking” in any way that the original vote isn’t, but we’re sure there’s a great explanation.
There can surely be no credible disputing that the SNP leadership election – and therefore that of Scotland’s next First Minister – is, to put it very mildly, under a cloud.
As things stand, whoever wins will be forever tainted by the process – easy meat for the Unionist opposition in the Holyrood chamber and the media and a potential legal challenge could cause untold further damage to the party.
With six days still left for voting, the case for a reballot – an administratively fairly trivial task in an election being conducted almost entirely online – is now unanswerable, and needn’t even involve a delay.
Hats off to the SNP. Every time we think that the party’s leadership election can’t get any more absurdly farcical, they pull something extra-mad out of the bag.
After this happened yesterday, it suddenly become “known” across the Scottish media that the SNP NEC was going to hold an extraordinary meeting in order to authorise the release of the membership figures after all three candidates demanded them.
Some of the country’s most senior hacks, including BBC Scotland’s Political Editor and the editor of the Daily Record, sombrely informed their readers of the development.
While idly browsing Twitter this morning, we made a startling discovery triggered by the SNP leadership election, and it was this: nobody in Scotland really knows what the nation’s law on abortion is.
It was prompted by these two tweets, both of which appear to be true:
The thing they agree on is that Humza Yousaf has just declared that he wants to change the law around abortion so that women can abort babies in Scotland solely on the grounds that they don’t like which sex they are. And that seems like something that should probably be bigger news.
But until this morning we’d regarded Kate Forbes as a decent consolation prize – no plan for indy, but at least someone who’d lead to the withdrawal of the toxic Scottish Greens from government and probably a mass exodus of the SNP’s Twitler Youth, leaving the party in a better place to rebuild for the future.
And after her disappointing chickening-out from the vote on the Gender Recognition Reform bill, we’d been impressed at the fortitude she’d shown by carrying on in the contest after the (justifiable) furore around her views on abortion and equal marriage, and her combative showing in Tuesday night’s STV debate.
Erin Lux, the co-convener of the extremist SNP affiliate Out For Independence, is the ultra-woke Canadian activist who tried to have Forbes kicked out of the election for “transphobia” almost as soon as she’d declared her candidacy.
OFI, whose membership is measured in dozens, has a disproportionate influence on policy but a microscopic percentage of votes in the election. The chances of any of its members ever voting for Kate Forbes under any circumstances are less than nil. She could have waded into the crowd and decapitated Lux with a chainsaw for all the difference it would have made to the number of votes she’s going to get from OFI.
But Forbes still folded like a deckchair in a hurricane.
Last month this site ran an article entitled “All The Nice Greens Love A Rapist”, and two days ago the Scottish version of the party officially confirmed it.
willie on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “And here’s a prediction. Sturgeon’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg will come to be seen alongside Prince Andrew’s interview with Emily…” May 31, 10:28
willie on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Just watched Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning interview with Sturgeon. Pinnochio would be hard pressed to come up with the whopper…” May 31, 10:21
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “If Fanon, Memmi, Cesaire, Elkins and the Jonesy boyo don’t explain the “colonial condition of Scots”, Alf, why do you…” May 31, 10:09
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “They’re also reporting a surge in donations to the SNP, as the faithful rush to make up the shortfall caused…” May 31, 09:52
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Wally Walrus returns from the fjords, to practice his extremely limited vocab on here. Keep your flapping flippers above the…” May 31, 09:46
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Sure. My predictive text replaces Scottish with Scittish all the time.” May 31, 09:38
Minceheid on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Hatey McHateface says: 30 May, 2026 at 8:31 pm She’s nae Humza Yusaf either. It was nice of you to…” May 31, 07:41
Phil on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Excellent post Red. You are dead right, there is nothing there. Or, as my Dad said when she first appeared…” May 31, 06:51
Dave on Marvola The Memory Woman: “No need to apologise for lacking a sense of humour, sweet cheeks 😉” May 31, 05:34
Young Lochinvar on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Probably realised at long last she isn’t getting any sympathy here except from the microscopic tranny community and that all…” May 31, 03:31
paul on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “That’s because the scotch folk are so horrible to embezzlers ,perjurors and criminals. It will be a warm breath of…” May 31, 02:05
Onlooker on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Don’t even think it’s as complicated as that, Alf, though what you say may be wee part of the overall…” May 31, 01:56
paul on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “The SNP have won lots of by-elections and elections before but since the sturgeon era (I include js and hy)…” May 31, 01:53
Cynicus on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Sorry, a link in the previous post became detached: https://www.headline.co.uk/titles/quintin-jardine/secrets-and-lies/9781035402939/” May 31, 01:53
Onlooker on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “It would be ‘mibbes naw’, smart cunt. Only middle class folk know big German words, and how to use them…” May 31, 01:41
Cynicus on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “in his quest for appropriate book titles, how did the Rev miss Quintin Jardine‘s Secrets and Lies ? It’s subtitle…” May 31, 00:16
Charles Mackay on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “The English press are reporting she has now moved to London-brazen betrayal” May 30, 23:48
100%Yes on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Nicola in the Kitchen with Husband and guest making cups of coffee, she really knows her way around the kitchen.…” May 30, 22:25
sarah on Off-topic: “Chortling at that, TC!” May 30, 22:24
robertkknight on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “D’Izzie… Your attempts to promote Independence via the morally, politically and financially bankrupt SNP will no doubt be welcomed by…” May 30, 22:02
sarah on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Izzie has mentioned that arthritis in her hands makes typing difficult. And if her IT system has predictive text then…” May 30, 22:01
Alf Baird on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: ““so many of the other writers” What writers? Aside from Doun-Hauden, I don’t see any other books explaining the colonial…” May 30, 21:34
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Careful, Izzie! Some of the public do care about spelling. More specifically, they conclude that somebody who doesn’t respect them…” May 30, 21:11
Hatey McHateface on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “As a writer of “colonially permitted literature”, Alf, why do you think you have been granted permission to publish, when…” May 30, 21:01
Izzie on Nicola’s Summer Reading List: “Meanwhile we who care abiut Scittish Independence are leafleting and canvassing to win bith by-elections. The public dont care about…” May 30, 20:52
