The less said about the Scottish Government’s toe-curlingly embarrassing “summit” last week, the sooner we can all pretend it never happened. We’ve got little to add to the withering assessments of Robin McAlpine and Kevin McKenna and just about everyone else who’s bothered covering this pathetic waste of everyone involved’s time. (Not that the time of most of these worthless quangocrats was worth anything anyway.)
We take a moment only to note something remarkable: the closest Scottish Labour’s hapless branch manager Anas Sarwar has ever come to understanding anything.
Yesterday the Scottish media gave Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman what she’s never willingly given anyone else – a platform on which to make her case.
Most did a very poor job challenging her on her outrageous comments about the Supreme Court, with BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime show being an especially wretched example of allowing the interviewee to ignore every question and then just ramble on endlessly about something else entirely, but LBC’s Gina Davidson was on top of her brief and put all the points that reasonable people wanted to be made, while giving Chapman ample time to answer uninterrupted.
Let’s break down how that went, with the help of our handy Bullshit Buzzer.
At the weekend, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman was filmed applauding as a notoriously unhinged transactivist ranted through a megaphone to a small and almost exclusively male crowd of protestors about how he was going to openly break the law by continuing to use women’s public toilets, and addressing JK Rowling with the words “We should all take a shite on you, you heinous creeping old bitch”.
At another protest, Chapman herself asserted that the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was motivated by not by a solemn consideration of the law or by the arguments of counsel who appeared before it, but by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.
Chapman is – incredibly – Deputy Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, and as such her comments sparked a storm of wholly justified outrage over her flagrant breach not only of Parliamentary rules but also of the law – specifically the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which requires all MSPs to uphold the independence of the judiciary.
Scottish Greens candidate and transactivist Matt “Ellie” Gomersall, with whom Wings readers will be familiar, appeared on the Jeremy Vine show today and blundered straight into an elephant trap a myopic mole could have seen coming on a foggy night.
Having just embarked on a diatribe in which he dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea that predatory men would ever pretend to be transwomen to gain access to vulnerable women, Vine asked him about Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, the convicted double rapist that even hapless Humza Yousaf felt able to confidently assert was “at it”.
Having just painted himself into a corner, Gomersall was then embarrassingly unable to disown Bryson as a “real” transwoman, thereby implicitly admitting that transwomen do indeed present a danger to women in exactly the same way that predatory men do, and torpedoing his entire core point that it was unfair to “discriminate” against them in exactly the same way single-sex spaces discriminate against non-trans men.
(Outrageously, earlier in the speech he’d tried to claim that it was only natural that some transwomen would be sex offenders because some biological women were.)
It’s tempting to believe that Gomersall was demonstrating an intellectual vacuum by making such vacuously cretinous arguments and failing to spot even the most obvious pitfalls in them, but the truth is far worse. Gomersall, and people like him, know that they’re lying (which is why they always try to silence opponents), but they lack the moral courage to face up to the fact that the inevitable price of their lies is vulnerable women being raped by what he revoltingly waves away as “fringe cases”.
All rapists are fringe cases. 95% of men would never dream of raping anyone. But we discriminate against ALL men in women’s spaces because you can’t tell which ones are rapists by looking. Men like “Ellie” Gomersall, though, think that the price of a few women being raped is worth paying to validate their delusions and fetishes (in his case, the creepy fetish of skinwalking as his pretty sister), and they don’t even have the shred of decency to bother coming up with a coherent line of bullshit to cover it.
It’s one of the most profoundly disappointing things about the last decade of Scottish politics that for about five minutes in 2015 we all thought that this awful dunderheaded foghorn was a bright new hope for the future.
In April 2021, the SNP were still the undisputed masters of all they surveyed. A poll conducted by Ipsos MORI that month showed them on 53% of the vote for the Scottish Parliament, a jawdropping 33 points ahead of their nearest rivals.
When the Holyrood election a month later was held, they won 64 seats, one more than they had done in 2016. Yet despite having led a minority government without any significant difficulties for the preceding five years, Nicola Sturgeon chose to invite the Greens to form a coalition with her party, and the effect that had on the public’s view of the government was… well, let’s see.
The difficulty is that any minute now, someone is going to ask the beleaguered First Minister the staggeringly obvious question that arises from the fact, namely:
This is the SNP’s latest messaging. Ministers, MSPs, payroll drones and the central party account were all tweeting the graphic and variations on the line yesterday.
And it’s quite difficult even just to count the number of different ways in which it’s not just mind-bogglingly offensive, but also clatteringly, jaw-droppingly stupid.
The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.
It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.
Nobody really answered the question in this article from a few days ago. A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government.
That scenario depends on all sorts of dubious propositions, but in any event what none of them have addressed is what that would change even if it did happen, given that Holyrood has a pro-indy majority RIGHT NOW (and has done so on every single day since the indyref more than a decade ago) and it’s produced nothing whatsoever in terms of movement towards independence by any possible measure.
And it occurred to us that we had genuinely no idea what the SNP’s current official indy strategy is, because the party’s been in such farcical chaos and turmoil ever since Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden resignation. So we thought we should go and check.
To be honest, we’re not much the wiser for having read it.
twathater on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “I wrote a similar comment on the fact that everyone from anywhere is now telling Scots what they can and…” Jun 26, 02:44
Anthem on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Sure about that? I heard it was the English that conquered NI.” Jun 26, 00:22
PhilM on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “I’m thinking of retiring to France soon and when I do I’m going to be welcomed by universal acclaim as…” Jun 25, 21:14
Hatey McHateface on Holiday Relief: “I’m disappointed, NC, I expected your dog to bark in Scots.” Jun 25, 20:48
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Holiday Relief: “Northcode, a peace-token, with respect and paragraphs… About a year ago I picked up for £4 in a second hand…” Jun 25, 20:25
Northcode on Holiday Relief: “woof woof woof” Jun 25, 20:11
AndrewR on Anatomy Of A Lunatic: “Hatey – “BTW. You seem to have an inaccurate picture of what I support and don’t support.” Sorry, huge apologies,…” Jun 25, 20:05
Hatey McHateface on Holiday Relief: “Too bad, Fearghas. You’ve failed Northcode’s ideological purity tests and now you must be reclassified yoon. You too Sven. You…” Jun 25, 19:52
Chas on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “794th time. Inching forward to the big 1000. Gaun yersel Alfie boy.” Jun 25, 19:32
Hatey McHateface on Anatomy Of A Lunatic: ““I find myself looking for Hatey’s reactions” Then you must be on the wrong forum. Because of the lack of…” Jun 25, 19:31
Northcode on Holiday Relief: “I don’t detect much in the way of respect emanating from your comment… so let’s not bother with that particular…” Jun 25, 19:21
Hatey McHateface on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Isn’t NI hoaching with yoons? In the event that demographic change forces unification of the island of Eire, won’t many…” Jun 25, 19:15
Anthem on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “I agree totally. Even though the tools are there to dismantle this disgusting, corrupt organisation, the streets and voices are…” Jun 25, 19:04
Hatey McHateface on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Shame. We’ll never know just how good it was. Anyhoo, Xaracen already has today’s Stellar Post Award, although Confused has…” Jun 25, 19:03
Ian McCubbin on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Northern Ireland has no resources do England wants rid of it and it’s people too costly to keep. Contrast that…” Jun 25, 18:51
100%Yes on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “I have no doubt in my mind that Swinney is happy for the Holyrood MSP’s to be sacrificed the same…” Jun 25, 18:17
James Jones on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “NI would be looking for reunification, not independence. Eire would have to be willing. Would they? Perhaps, but it’s complicated.…” Jun 25, 18:11
AndrewR on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “not for publication I think I was just modded, for my email about Hatey. Thankyou! Again. He can look after…” Jun 25, 17:55
Callum on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “GTF Seamus GTF Scotland 1 & 2 for me in 2026 for any party that backs national elections as de…” Jun 25, 17:46
Alf Baird on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “This fits well with what postcolonial theory tells us about the decolonization process: https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/05/25/the-three-phases-of-decolonization-lessons-for-scotland/” Jun 25, 17:26
Frank Waring on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Why not organise to have a true independence referendum in, say, 18 months, and raise the money to pay for…” Jun 25, 16:50
Mark Beggan on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “And people talked about MI5 conspiracy. Who needs to conspire when you’ve got Scotlands very own guide to Failure. An…” Jun 25, 16:29
Insider on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “A “soupsong ” ??? Minny, minny, minny, minestrone…. We are the alphabetties…happy girls and boys… Cock-a-leekie (favourite of many MSPs)…” Jun 25, 16:22
Aidan on A different school: “@Xaracen – you aren’t making any recognised form of legal argument that can be engaged with though. You seem to…” Jun 25, 16:15
James on A different school: “Don’t waste your time engaging, James C, these are paid trolls.” Jun 25, 16:07
duncanio on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “After saying “challenging the Westminster parties to concede the principle of consent in letting Scotland determine its own democratic future…” Jun 25, 15:59
Athanasius on But Don’t Give Yourself Away: “Of course, there is also the fact that Westminster would like nothing more than to actually get rid of Northern…” Jun 25, 15:51
Aidan on A different school: “Without going into too much detail, essentially it gives the Scottish people the ability to act as a check on…” Jun 25, 15:50
AndrewR on Anatomy Of A Lunatic: “Confused: do you know any English people? Or any Muslims for that matter. I find myself looking for Hatey’s reactions…” Jun 25, 15:41
