It’s probably as good an illustration of the madness currently engulfing Scottish politics as anything that unlikely suspect Anas Sarwar may have just – temporarily at least – saved Humza Yousaf’s job.
And although our head hurts already, we’ll try to explain why.
We tweeted this last night as a teaser for our big exclusive. (Which is now hilariously being claimed by Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record seven hours later.)
And it does now seem to be the case that the news is that the SNP are ending the Bute House Agreement and kicking out the Greens before the Greens do it first.
And what that tells us, for a starter, is that the SNP’s once-legendary skill in news management really is now well and truly on fire, as in “bin”.
Correct us if we’re wrong, but isn’t this guy:
…the same man who LITERALLY just passed a law dividing Scotland into groups of people who are worthy of protection from hatred and those who aren’t? (Most notably women and people who know what sex they are.)
Is he, then, a “bad faith actor”? Maybe we misunderstood.
Now, before we start this piece we should probably note that we don’t think anyone’s losing anything by being excluded from Believe In Scotland’s latest money-gathering exercise (folding, please, not clinking!) in Glasgow later this month. We rather suspect most folk can manage fine without spending a Saturday afternoon listening to tedious speeches from Pat Kane, Ross Greer and Iona Fyfe.
But this is still disturbing:
Because for a party which pretty much never mentions Scottish independence, which conspicuously removed the word “INDEPENDENCE” from their conference banner last week, and which stated just days ago that independence wouldn’t be any sort of red line preventing them doing a coalition deal with Scottish Labour, to be able to effectively veto the participation of ACTUAL independence parties from (ostensibly) independence rallies is a strange state of affairs indeed.
Scotland’s fringe wankertariat has been terribly piqued by the amusing fact that Humza Yousaf’s infamous “WHITE!” speech has been reported as a hate crime more than any other event in Scotland since the introduction of the Hate Crime Act 12 days ago, on the grounds of its supposedly being racist.
The Observer, for example, blamed the stat on “neo-Nazis”.
But even if that were true, it wouldn’t of course disprove the claim. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and something isn’t intrinsically false just because a neo-Nazi says it. Hitler had some pretty messed-up ideas but the world didn’t become flat just because he said it was round.
So as is our wont, let’s look at the facts.
Looking for the world’s most useless figures of authority? Come to Scotland.
There, for example, is the Scottish Government refusing to even make a statement of its position on the Cass Review, which exposed the grotesque medical experiments still being conducted on hundreds of Scottish children, and trying to pass the buck onto someone else.
But they’re not alone in the abdication of their responsibilities.
Upper pic: Scottish Greens Spring Conference 2023.
Lower pic: Scottish Greens Spring Conference 2024.
Who can spot the missing word?
So here’s a thing.
But that’s not how the Hate Crime Act is supposed to work.
This is from the Financial Memorandum prepared by the Scottish Government for the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021.
And here’s the reality after ONE DAY.
So that went well.
Thanks to the dedication of our legal team in working over the Easter holiday, Wings has unexpectedly received the formal Opinion of legal counsel (hereafter called “the Opinion”, capitalised to avoid confusion with the ordinary use of the word in the article) with regard to the standing of the site in the light of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which comes into force tomorrow.
We publish the Opinion below, partly to assist those worried about the Act’s impact on them but unable to afford their own legal advice.
But we also do so to place Police Scotland on notice that anything published by Wings Over Scotland is done in the light of the greatest possible care having been taken to ensure compliance with the law, and that in such a context any future attempt/s to improperly interfere with our rights of free expression under Article 10 of the European Convention On Human Rights (ECHR) will be viewed with regard to pursuing the maximum available recourse for wrongful restriction of our lawful activities.
We have both funds and the will to pursue such action.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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