Wings Over Scotland

I was going to write this article yesterday, but 2024’s miserable damp squib of a summer unexpectedly delivered a beautiful day – a perfect 20C of unbroken sunshine with a refreshing slight breeze – so I went for a nice walk instead.

Rather than my usual bird-feeding and bear-patrolling beat along the river and canal, I headed off on what used to be my standard summer stroll: up the long steep hill to Beckford’s Tower and its associated cemetery with stunning views over the city.

I’ll scatter a few pics from the walk throughout this feature, as otherwise I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit depressing and angering.

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We were going to write a follow-up piece to this last week, until the SNP detonated a hand-grenade in its own trouser pocket. But with the coronation of John Swinney this afternoon after the only challenger sold out for some shiny beads and trinkets, we can get back to some serious news.

The controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which has been involved in a number of serious child sexual abuse scandals, continues to exert considerable influence on Scotland’s education system, thanks to extremely lavish funding from taxpayers – well over a million pounds from hard-pressed councils in the last year alone to address unspecified issues whose urgency is difficult to identify.

After our last piece we sent LGBTYS a letter raising our concerns about their improper interference with primary schools, something we were obliged to do before we could file a formal complaint with Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR.

We received an automated reply on 24 April saying “We are currently experiencing staff shortages and it may take up to a week to respond to your email.”

That deadline expired five days ago, and we will now be writing to the OSCR. But in the meantime LGBTYS persists in exceeding its remit, with deeply alarming results.

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Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph has filed a series of excellent but deeply disturbing articles this month about the growing presence in Scottish primary schools of LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity which has been heavily involved in not one but two serious child abuse scandals, one of them the most horrific in Scottish history.

But LGBTYS seems to be able to do whatever it wants.

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The Scottish Government’s website about its controversial and extremely disturbing new “conversion practices” legislation assures citizens that the proposal was formed after consultation with an “Expert Advisory Group”.

But all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to want you to know who they were.

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There was an independence rally in Ayr today. They got a fairly nice sunny day for it. But in the supposed “summer of independence”, the self-proclaimed “First Activist” wasn’t there. That’s because he was here instead.

As far as we’re aware, LGBT Youth Scotland remains under police investigation for the suspected grooming and sexual exploitation of children. It’s impossible to imagine any other sort of organisation that could still expect to enjoy the patronage of a First Minister under such circumstances – especially when there were obvious other places he could be reasonably expected to show his face – but that’s how the SNP’s priorities roll in 2023 and there’s no getting away from it.

For any question to do with independence, folks, Humza Yousaf is not the answer.

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

It really needs a wider audience.

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The charity LGBT Youth Scotland is currently the subject of a live police investigation over its involvement in a second major child-abuse scandal in little over a decade.

So you’d expect Police Scotland to be taking that pretty seriously, right?

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Wings readers are by now familiar with the face of Jack/Beth Douglas, the transgender Scottish Greens activist with a long history of abuse and advocating violence against women who is nonetheless feted and worshipped by most of the Scottish Parliament.

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.

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As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.

At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.

Today is the second kind of day.

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To: Humza Yousaf (Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care), Shirley-Anne Somerville (Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills) and Clare Haughey (Minister for Children and Young People)

28 April 2022

Dear Mr Yousaf, Ms Somerville and Ms Haughey,

Cass Interim Report: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – Implications for Scotland

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Not for the first time, a certain section of society in Scotland and elsewhere is today engaged in the furious insistence that words don’t mean what they actually mean.

The words above are not ambiguous. They call for the “elimination” of “all laws limiting [the] legal capacity of adolescents […] to consent to sex”. The only laws which limit the legal capacity of adolescents – people aged from 10 to 19, according to both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations – to consent to sex are age of consent laws. The clue is somewhat in the name.

If organisations don’t want those laws abolished so that 10-year-olds can have sex, then they shouldn’t sign their names to statements saying that they do.

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While watching reports from the Alba Party women’s conference that took place this afternoon, we saw something that we thought must be wrong.

But it wasn’t.

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