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The Spider’s Web 161

Posted on December 05, 2023 by

The Scottish Government will make history tomorrow. For the first time ever since the advent of devolution 24 years ago, it will take the Scottish Information Commissioner to the Court Of Session to prevent disclosure of information.

On the bench will be the full firepower of the inner council of the Scottish judiciary. The Lord President himself, Lord Carloway, will be presiding (and presumably lording) over the hearing. Joining him on the bench will be a former Lord Advocate, Lord Boyd, and a former Solicitor General, Lord Pentland – pictured below, and of whom readers will last have heard here.

To use the legal parlance, that’s a big-boy lineup.

To present their case, the Government are fielding not one but two King’s Counsel – James Mure KC and Paul Reid KC.

This top legal talent does not come cheap and nor does a Court Of Session hearing. So what is this vital information that the Scottish Government – which as recently as May this year pledged to “ensure that we are the most transparent Government on these islands” – is trying so desperately to hide from the Scottish public, at the Scottish public’s very considerable expense?

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When It’s Just Too Dark To Care 487

Posted on November 23, 2023 by

Just under four years ago the world was hit by a pandemic that spread like wildfire and caused misery wherever it reached. It’ll be remembered by almost everyone who lived through it, especially those who worked to protect society’s most vulnerable.

We’ve all heard about its effect on our NHS, but less so on those working within social care. As the COVID inquiries on both sides of the border continue to reveal more and more troubling information, Wings readers should hear the story of what it was like to work in social care in Scotland during the COVID pandemic.

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The Safest People On Earth 218

Posted on November 21, 2023 by

Yesterday was “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, which was the 41st “special” day of 2023 so far for trans people.

(Including but not limited to International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; International Pronouns Day; International Transgender Day Of Visibility; Transgender Awareness Week and of course the whole of “Pride Month”, which is now an almost entirely trans-focused event).

Citizens of Scotland and the UK were solemnly instructed to “remember the many trans people whose lives have been tragically cut short by violence”, although weirdly none of the politicians issuing the orders actually named any.

However, since we’re endlessly being told that trans people are the most marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable members of our society, and that an actual “trans genocide” is currently in progress, we expect there have been loads.

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Down The Pipe 64

Posted on October 16, 2023 by

As alert readers will have noticed, Wings has been perusing the SNP’s Governance And Transparency Review over the last couple of days, a document which tentatively attempts to discern just how big a mess the party’s previous leadership has left it in.

(SPOILER: a really big one.)

The paper has now also reached the mainstream media.

Wings already touched on that particular aspect of the party’s mismanagement back in August, but in the light of the report now formally acknowledging the problem it’s worth taking a moment to establish just how astonishingly bad it is.

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Glory days 242

Posted on October 10, 2023 by

The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.

And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.

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The washing of the hands 289

Posted on September 20, 2023 by

The Scottish National Party, in legal character, is what’s known as an unincorporated association. (The same form of entity as Wings, local colour fans.)

This has a number of interesting ramifications.

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To Another World 220

Posted on September 03, 2023 by

So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.

It’s smaller than we imagined.

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How Scotland Hates Women 137

Posted on August 31, 2023 by

Readers may have been baffled by a news story yesterday, in which an event where two men insulted each other in the street (“Deviant!”, “Bigot!”) has led to one of them, but not the other, being arrested and charged with an unspecified crime by police.

In particular, many people on social media have contrasted the situation with one from a month ago, when a large male transactivist violently assaulted a feminist woman at a “Women Won’t Wheesht” meeting in Aberdeen but merely received a recorded warning rather than being arrested and charged.

So we’re very grateful to Roddy Dunlop KC, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates (the “trade” body of Scotland’s senior barristers), for posting an extremely informative, and disturbing, summary of the relevant laws on Twitter this morning.

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The Lasting Effect Of A Single Word 93

Posted on August 27, 2023 by

This is a Sunday Mail cover story today:

And it’s almost easy to dismiss it as meaningless. You can report to the police that aliens dug up your prize petunias and they’ll record it and give it a reference number and promise to investigate, before concluding that it was actually the neighbour’s cat.

But there’s one word in the 500-word piece that makes it much more interesting.

Can you spot it, readers?

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The Hollow Heart 192

Posted on August 25, 2023 by

Yesterday we took an extensive tour of all the red flags in the SNP’s 2022 accounts, which show a party in very deep financial trouble. But there was one part we left out because it deserves a post of its own.

The picture above – which was posted by then-CEO Peter Murrell during last year’s SNP conference – is a revealing one in all kinds of ways.

It starkly exposes how a party chose to hold an event for around 800 members in a venue with a capacity of 15,000 and then went to a lot of effort to disguise how empty the space was, rather than, for example, just hiring somewhere of an appropriate size (and cost) in the first place.

(Look how far into the hall the stage has been placed, leaving half the arena vacant, to then be hidden behind a giant screen and curtains and banners in order to give a false impression of how full it is.)

But what’s more symbolic is that there are almost no people in it.

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Dead Cat Bouncing 58

Posted on August 24, 2023 by

We know the meanings of words are very flexible these days, especially in the SNP.

But this isn’t our understanding of the term “turning around”:

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The murmur of the cottonwood trees 89

Posted on July 20, 2023 by

Even not-very-alert readers will have noticed that we’re taking a little summer holiday in the complete absence of any political events. Rest assured that we’re using the time to patrol Bath diligently for bears. But we couldn’t help noticing this on Twitter today.

Someone tweeted it to show that as late as summer 2020 the SNP was still soliciting money for what it called its “ring fenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund”.

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