Wings Over Scotland

At FMQs today, Douglas Ross announced that he was putting down a motion of no confidence in the Scottish Government in the wake of the collapse of the Bute House agreement. That creates an enormously interesting situation, because the arithmetic of Parliament is extremely finely balanced, and particularly in the light of Patrick Harvie’s subsequent contribution.

In short, what it means is that the future of the government hangs on Ash Regan.

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News reaches Wings this evening that Humza Yousaf has called an emergency meeting of the Scottish Cabinet at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, just a couple of hours before FMQs. (This information has been confirmed directly to us by a source very close to a member of said Cabinet.)

An emergency Cabinet meeting is an extraordinarily rare event. As far as we’re able to establish there have only been two during the SNP’s time in power – when the budget failed to pass in 2009 and Alex Salmond’s administration had to decide whether or not to trigger a general election, and one the day after the Brexit vote to supposedly plan a second indyref (LOL). But in any case they’re extremely unusual.

The subject of the meeting has not been disclosed to us. It could, for example, concern imminent developments in Operation Branchform, or it could relate to the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. The men in grey kilts may have come for the FM. Or Scotland could be about to declare war on Morocco or something. But we are told that the fact of the meeting taking place is a 100% certainty.

So no sleeping in tomorrow, readers. It’s probably going to be big.

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 pause button has been released. The day is finally here.

And it’s one that EVERY supporter of independence should rejoice in.

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We unreservedly applaud the swiftness with which the office of the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament have delivered this answer, something which other bodies in Scotland could learn from.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

The content of it, however, is more disturbing.

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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.

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Last week SNP MP Fulton MacGregor told Newsnight that the grotesque, draconian Hate Crime Act was necessary because “hate crime is a major problem across Scotland”, which “wreaks havoc on individuals, on communities and on families”.

Now, we have to admit that we hadn’t heard of much havoc being wreaked across Scotland by hate crime. Hate crime stats in Scotland have actually been falling for years  – the most recent figures for racial hatred, for example, are 31% lower than the peak year of 2011-12.

If there have been stories of rampaging mobs terrorising gay people, of a wave of violence against Sikhs, or widespread arson campaigns against Italian chip shops, they’ve escaped our attention.

But of course, the onscreen discussion focused mostly on the group that the Scottish Government is obsessed with to the exclusion of all others – transgender people.

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Alert readers may recall that it’s only three-and-a-bit years since the SNP somehow spent £386,000 of its members’ money fitting out its party HQ at Jackson’s Entry in Edinburgh, a pricey piece of prime real estate just yards from Holyrood, with shiny new furniture while it was sitting empty during COVID.

So it’s a little surprising that they’re suddenly doing a flit now.

We wonder if there might be a downsizing in the offing.

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More than three months have passed since Alex Salmond launched a lawsuit against the Scottish Government for its grotesquely botched handling of false allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

With Scottish politics currently in a completely moribund state, as the party of government disintegrates shambolically and the main opposition party keeps its mouth shut and its head down in an attempt to not destroy its newfound and extremely fragile status as a credible alternative, one might imagine that the political media would be desperate for the case to get under way and provide them with some juicy content.

So it’s slightly surprising that none of them has noticed the latest development.

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As the long-running police probe into SNP finances continues, Wings received some slightly surprising news today in the form of an FOI response.

Based on reports from various trustworthy sources we’d expected to hear that the police side of the investigation was by this point winding down somewhat, with most matters of fact already established, detectives assigned to other duties and the ball now largely in the court of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS).

But it seems that isn’t so.

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We make no apology for returning once again to the depressing subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.

Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.

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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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