Wings Over Scotland

There is a not particularly funny joke that is sometimes told in legal circles about why a law student failed to finish his coursework – because he had no conviction. With rare exceptions lawyers aren’t renowned for their sense of humour but I can’t help thinking someone, at the highest levels of our justice system, is having a right laugh at my expense and those who have loyally supported me over the past six years.

I’m talking about the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC – a sitting member of the Scottish Government’s cabinet who was nominated by Nicola Sturgeon to that post in 2021, five months after I was acquitted.

For those unfamiliar with my case, I offer this brief summary. In March 2020 I made a short video on my mobile phone that was two minutes and thirty eight seconds in length. I hadn’t planned to make the video when I went out for a walk in a field near my home. But I was annoyed and wanted to articulate that annoyance, although at the time I recorded it I wasn’t intending for it to go much further.

Later that night, just before turning in, I uploaded it to my YouTube channel on a closed, unlisted link and then posted that link to my Twitter account that, at the time, had a modest 1000 or so followers. I then forgot about it.

Little did I know that short mobile phone video would result in me facing initially a criminal trial, then a five year legal battle in the highest civil court in Scotland and now, most likely, an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

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Well, we gave it a go.

It seems that it’s fine to farm important judgments out to mysterious shadowy figures who just make important chunks of them up out of thin air, and then issue them in your own name. Back in your boxes, plebs.

We figured someone had to at least try.

So in the light of this, we’ve sent a letter.

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This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

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We thought we should keep track of all the issues with the Peggie tribunal judgment, now that Sandie Peggie has officially announced her intention to appeal it.

Because this story has some distance left to run.

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On 5 April 2021, I sent a short and simple Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to the Scottish Government asking for:

“All written evidence to James Hamilton’s QC investigation into the FM under the ministerial code. This includes evidence from the FM, her chief of staff Liz Lloyd and any other individuals within the Scottish Government who have submitted evidence.”

Over four and a half years later, because of the government’s pathological aversion to transparency and accountability, we’re still not there.

But we’re inching closer.

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Last week we introduced readers to Sophia “Tarquin” Brooks, the 18-year-old boy who Graham Linehan is currently on trial for supposedly “assaulting”, and in particular his connection to disgraced former policeman and serial harasser Lynsay Watson.

(From reporting of the proceedings at Westminster Magistrates Court, it sounds very much like Watson has been directing and influencing Tarquin’s complaints to the police – which had originally been dismissed as baseless – and was largely responsible for the matter getting to trial.)

But Watson isn’t the only middle-aged trans-identifying man with whom “Tarquin” has a seemingly close relationship when it comes to the relentless, vindictive persecution of people who believe in biological sex.

We think (but haven’t been able to verify) that that’s Watson on the left of the thumbnail of the above video, in the facemask and with a brown bag amid extraordinary scenes as Tarquin left the court after giving his evidence.

But the burly, blond bespectacled man at the centre of it, who appears to be acting as some sort of official representative for “Tarquin”, is Stephanie Hayden – born Anthony Halliday, who changed his name in 2005 to Steven Hayden shortly after being released from the Sex Offenders Register (more on that below) before obtaining a GRC in the name of “Stephanie” in 2017.

Hayden is a convicted paedophile and self-described lawyer who, like Lynsay Watson, dedicates his entire life to the persecution of gender-critical campaigners.

And as remarkable as it might seem to anyone who read our previous piece, Hayden may be the more toxic of the two.

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We’ve written already about the magnitude of the error transactivists have made in bringing about the arrest of Graham Linehan on trumped-up incitement charges. But thanks to the excellent work of court reporter Nick Wallis this week, the sheer scale of it is still only beginning to unfold.

At its heart is a scarcely-believable tale about how a tiny handful of deeply mentally ill men – at the core, just three – have for years orchestrated a campaign of vindictive, hateful intimidation and terror which has caused untold suffering to individuals, done catastrophic damage to the reputation of the police, and cost the taxpayer millions of pounds, all in a desperate attempt to validate their own delusions.

It’s going to be no small task to summarise it for you. But let’s do our best.

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Alert readers will be familiar with this site’s ongoing quest for an explanation as to why controversy-plagued charity LGBT Youth Scotland continues to operate in dozens of Scottish primary and even nursery schools, pushing gender ideology onto children as young as four despite only having a remit to support 13-25-year-olds.

Last month we were, to coin a phrase, stonewalled by Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR, but we filed a review request and today we received – a couple of weeks past the deadline – a response.

Below is a quick video of it.

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Social media was having a good chuckle at this earlier today.

But as it turns out, it’s a bit more than just an embarrassment.

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Well, it’s always nice to be a landmark for free speech.

But let’s start at the beginning.

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Alert readers will have noticed our so-far-fruitless attempts to extract information from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator regarding the disturbing activities of the controversy-plagued LGBT Youth Scotland.

We are far from the only people raising concerns about the charity – we know of at least 17 separate formal complaints against LGBTYS in the past year alone, yet the OSCR has declined to open any sort of formal inquiry into them. (It carried out three such inquiries in 2024.)

But despite the OSCR’s assertion that “we strive to be transparent and accountable”, when we went to find those complaints (including, of course, the one from ourselves) to link you to them, we hit a brick wall that rapidly turned into a whole new concern.

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