It’s increasingly common now for the Scottish news to feature another prison scandal or employment-tribunal judgment highlighting the extent of gender-ideology capture in the country’s public authorities.
But it’s normally quite hard to get an overall picture of just how captured any particular public body really is, so we should offer some thanks to the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) who’ve helpfully provided us with a comprehensive primer in the form of a briefing for a board update later this week.
Innocent readers might have thought that the people managing a national park would be most concerned about attracting visitors, protecting wildlife, repairing paths and keeping local businesses sustainable, that sort of thing. But that’s not how things work in Scotland any more.
Because the CNPA are about to present the organisation’s 19 board members with an 91-page report and annex detailing all their vital work on… equalities issues.
So as promised, and having now spent 11 months trying to get answers any other way, this afternoon we had a live chat with controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
In April last year we wrote to LGBT Youth Scotland asking them to explain why they were conducting activities in primary schools (and even with pre-school children) about sexual matters despite only having a remit to work with young people aged 13-25.
We received no reply, so we contacted the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, who sent a rather sniffy acknowledgement saying:
“If your concern leads us to making inquiries with the charity, we are unable to update you on the status of those inquiries. For more information about what to expect after you submit a concern, read our guidance on how OSCR deals with concerns and inquiries.”
That link, you’ll be amazed to hear, leads to a dead page.
Much of Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK and beyond (the story below ran in the London Standard), has been grimly gripped this week by the ongoing and scarcely believable trainwreck that is Sandie Peggie Vs NHS Fife.
The tribunal has now overrun the time allotted to it, and will reconvene for another 10 days in the second half of July, ramping up the already considerable costs incurred by NHS Fife, which is in the middle of a huge financial crisis.
According to legal experts, there is little doubt about the law surrounding the dispute. NHS Fife is clearly and unambiguously in the wrong – Dr Beth Upton, the transwoman at the centre of the problem, is legally as well as biologically male, and had no lawful entitlement to be in a female changing room. The authority also appears to be in very considerable potential trouble over failing to disclose key documents and evidence when ordered by the original judge.
So it seems remarkable that the board of NHS Fife is allowing the case to continue rather than immediately conceding to save money and any more public humiliation of both itself and its staff, like the hapless nurse manager Esther Davidson who endured a very uncomfortable two days in the witness box this week, and the clearly manifestly incompetent Equality And Human Rights Lead Officer, Isla Bumba, who yesterday deleted her LinkedIn page after being identified as the person who gave Davidson incorrect and unlawful guidance.
Readers may have noticed recent speculation in the media (based on the wording of a press release) that Police Scotland had ended their investigations regarding Operation Branchform. As it happened we’d already submitted a Freedom Of Information request aimed at finding that out, and the response arrived this evening.
The National carried a strange article yesterday, apropos of seemingly nothing, about a Brussels-based political thinktank supposedly linked to the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The piece actually originated on superwoke “fact-checking” site The Ferret a couple of days earlier, and professed to expose how the thinktank was “stoking Scotland’s culture war”.
Alert readers will already have pricked up their ears at this point, because “culture war” is a radical-left dogwhistle term used to obscure, belittle and dismiss groups (largely though not exclusively comprising left-wing feminists) fighting for the safeguarding of children and the protection of women’s and LGB rights.
The Scottish Government just issued another response in the long-running Freedom Of Information battle with alert Wings reader Benjamin Harrop over its conspiracy to frame and imprison the late Alex Salmond on false charges. Here’s a genuine extract.
To be honest, readers, the peculiar events of yesterday continued to nag at us all day as every news broadcaster in Scotland and beyond leapt eagerly on the ludicrous non-story from the Herald On Sunday’s front page. (It was even the #2 item on BBC Radio Wales, inexplicably).
For such an absolute nothingball of scurrilous sub-gossip to so dominate the entire news media was just too strange to ignore. We cannot remember the last time a low-grade freelancer managed to sell the same story to FOUR major Scottish newspapers – who normally, remember, only want exclusives for their big front-page splashes – let alone a crummy opinion columnist (not even an actual news reporter) who’s only been back in journalism for five minutes after a 15-year break as a failed PR guru.
(Once they’d all run the shoddy hatchet piece, TV and radio then had all the excuse they needed to blare it across the airwaves. “Oh, it’s not us inflating and amplifying this garbage, guv, we’re just reporting what the papers are saying.”)
So in our eternal quest for enlightenment and understanding we thought we’d see if we could find out a bit more about the little-known but recently-revived sleeper assassin with the ironic name: Carlos Alba.
Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.
When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.
And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.
When times are quiet in Scottish politics, as they currently are, our favourite genre of story is “mainstream press belatedly catches up with Wings Over Scotland”. And so to this morning’s front page splash in the Sunday Mail.
The rumour mill has been grinding about Operation Branchform developments again in the last few days, although we’ve seen too many false dawns now to get overly excited about that. But the Mail’s story sounded awfully familiar.
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “You have nicely side stepped my point leaving the control of the English doesn’t instantly equal paradise If it does…” Apr 5, 13:02
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “You guys really like jumping back and forward a couple of hundred years to make your argument hold. If you…” Apr 5, 13:02
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “We can safely ignore all unionist parties as they are nothing more then far right scottish hating English worshipping tools…” Apr 5, 12:44
TURABDIN on Mad caps: “Yoon Scum 10:11 UTOPIAS, as the name implies do not exist in reality, however the former American colonies have done…” Apr 5, 12:44
yoon scum on Mad caps: “Both of us are trying to pick up the turd by the clean end I’d far rather we had politicians…” Apr 5, 12:40
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “Mark Ruskell another graduate groupie. Another Ponce on the Vine. SCOTLAND NEEDS ADULTS!! Stop the graduate brat mafia destroying our…” Apr 5, 12:25
Old John on Mad caps: “A veritable tombola of hats. I’m a trifle confused as to who would wear the Roundhead or Cavalier ones though.…” Apr 5, 12:08
George Ferguson on Mad caps: “@ Sarah Tin Foil Hat Ross Greer Black YMCA hat Patrick Harvie Trans Hat Maggie Chapman Dunce Hat Lorna Slater…” Apr 5, 12:05
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “Sums up the freak show nicely.” Apr 5, 12:04
Skip_NC on Mad caps: “I should have thought it was obvious that, after independence, the constitutional question goes away almost completely. So parties and…” Apr 5, 11:50
Anthem on Mad caps: “That’s the thing. You can’t! They sneek in through the list system.” Apr 5, 11:37
Rev. Stuart Campbell on Mad caps: “Nobody voted “on mass” for the Greens. They got 8% on the list.” Apr 5, 11:23
sarah on Mad caps: “Had me laughing out loud, Chris – many thanks! Have you allotted specific mad hats to Mad Hatters? Which ones…” Apr 5, 11:17
Peter Glasgow on Mad caps: “We could also vote Scottish MP’s out if they’re sh*t/grifters/wrong uns etc” Apr 5, 10:46
Sven on Mad caps: “I’m not so sure that “happily” advocating spending public money in a foreign country to add to its infrastructure is…” Apr 5, 10:36
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “America left control of the English in 1775 Seeing that the vital element in achieving utopia is leaving control of…” Apr 5, 10:11
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “if you want me to defend the Labour MPs who want to BUILD an airport in Pakistan when compared to…” Apr 5, 10:09
Cynicus on Mad caps: “How about this one? https://tinyurl.com/ClownBowler” Apr 5, 10:09
Andrew scott on Mad caps: “Maggie chapperson or dross geer-what a prospect” Apr 5, 10:05
Sven on Mad caps: “Yoon Scum @ 08.53. Reads a wee bit like that song about, “What do you with a pronlem like Greer.”.…” Apr 5, 09:52
TURABDIN on Mad caps: “IN PAX AMERICANA à la Trump/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg etc they know the price of everything, flash the greenbacks and all prostrate in…” Apr 5, 09:51
diabloandco on Mad caps: “And American chocolate, American sitcoms ( or is that the cheese to which you refer?) and Trump , Musk et…” Apr 5, 09:45
Former President Xiden on The Gender Of Mountains: “Meetings, the practical alternative to work.” Apr 5, 09:38
Former President Xiden on The Gender Of Mountains: “We are living in a clown show.????” Apr 5, 09:37
Captain Caveman on Mad caps: “Heh! This made me laugh out loud. Gotta love the Space Cadet helmet!” Apr 5, 09:13
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “So cough up my tenner” Apr 5, 08:55
Yoon scum on Mad caps: “Lets take this as a time for us to reflect on how we got here and where we go With…” Apr 5, 08:53
yoon scum on Mad caps: “How about scotland becomes a USA state I get guns, cheap fuel, right wing politics and low taxes You get…” Apr 5, 08:21
Bill Cowan on Mad caps: “The Mad Party’s C Hatters? ? *With apologies to Lewis Carroll” Apr 5, 08:08
Effijy on Mad caps: “Are those hats made of recycled materials? That party needs recycled? Off topic- watching a documentary about Greenland. The colonisers,…” Apr 5, 07:13