Wings Over Scotland

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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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.

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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.

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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.

The list of let’s call them “irregularities” is almost endless. The artificial truncation of the contest, against the SNP constitution; the packing of the hustings with Humza Yousaf supporters; candidates being denied any knowledge about the size of the membership until voting was under way, and then the party’s press chief and CEO both resigning over lying about it; the apparent existence of 6000 more ballot papers than the party has members; one of the Scottish Government’s most senior officers being improperly seconded to the Yousaf campaign (and then also resigning as a result); numerous documented examples of non-members being given votes while fully-paid-up members weren’t; we could, frankly, go on and on.

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.

Only one person stands in the way.

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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.

Only trouble was, nobody had told the SNP NEC.

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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.

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Wings has backed Ash Regan in the SNP leadership election, because she’s the only one with an actual plan for independence and the only one who doesn’t immediately start talking about something else if you bring the subject up.

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.

But this footage from last night’s hustings in Johnstone is incredibly disturbing.

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.

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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.

But just like their counterparts in England and Wales, the Scottish Greens’ fondness for turning a blind eye to rape isn’t new.

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“We’re working with GCHQ on the election.”

We don’t know about you, folks, but we’re not all that reassured.

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