Wings Over Scotland

This is incredible.

We couldn’t put it better than Alba MP Neale Hanvey, who said:

“A cunning plan… let’s fight to preserve a law we’ve just done a major U-turn on, completely undermining our claims it was ‘safe’. Remember when Scottish Labour played opposite sides of the argument? Well, even they didn’t argue both sides on the same front page on the same day.”

The SNP are a flailing shambles of incompetence, under a leader fast losing her iron grip on her own party as they watch her turning it into a laughing stock with growing horror. More and more disquiet reaches our ears from within her increasingly leaky and nervous Parliamentary groups. Who will be the first to tie their courage to a flagpole and make the move to mutiny? We can only wait and see.

Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.

BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)

On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)

She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.

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Last night we couldn’t help chuckling at this.

Because as someone else on Twitter mocked, what’s actually laughable is the idea that criminals would never engage in any kind of deception in order to commit crimes, and that someone like Peter Tatchell would be so idiotic as to suggest such a thing.

But tonight it’s not even blackly comic.

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More than a day on from our disturbing exposé of how the Scottish Parliament has been captured by a tiny, sleazy nest of pornographers, drug addicts, fetishists and abusers, there still hasn’t been a single comment distancing themselves from the group by any of the MSPs identified in the article, including Patrick Harvie, Ross Greer, Joe Fitzpatrick, Paul Sweeney and most notably Alex Cole-Hamilton, who made the remarkable public statement that MSPs were directly and specifically passing gender reform laws for the benefit of male sex worker and violent serial abuser Beth Douglas.

We’ve asked Alex Cole-Hamilton for comment several times without reply. (Although there has been an unverified third-hand answer via Willie Rennie and a Twitter user.)

Wings Over Scotland makes absolutely no assertions about why MSPs wouldn’t want to very clearly and unambiguously disassociate themselves from such an unpleasant character after information about him had been brought to light in a widely-read (over 200,000 views) article which was trending on Twitter all day yesterday.

For the avoidance of doubt, we have no information about any interactions between Douglas and any MSPs that we’re keeping secret. But we’re not the least bit surprised that people have started wondering what possible reasons a whole string of male politicians could have for not wanting to upset a male prostitute, particularly given the long and sordid history of male politicians and male prostitutes in the UK.

To quash such speculation, we once again urge all MSPs who have associated with Beth Douglas to clearly and publicly disavow him and assure voters that he will no longer shape or influence legislation passed in the Scottish Parliament.

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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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Our favourite of many amusing responses on Twitter today to the string of SNP MPs, MSPs and assorted other apparatchiks falling over themselves to say that they walked around yesterday’s anti-feminist protest in Glasgow with their eyes wide shut:

Wings will have a major article related to the subject dropping tomorrow morning, put together in conjunction with The Glinner Update. Please do tune in from 8am.

Our sinister network of shadowy agents informs us that the document below has just been sent by Murray Foote to all SNP Parliamentarians. (Click to enlarge.)

It would appear that the SNP is feeling some heat.

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Footage from tonight’s glamorous dinner for the captains of the independence industry.

See you same time next year for the same speech again, gang.

The final result of our Twitter poll from yesterday was pretty conclusive.

(It was also by a distance the biggest response we can ever remember getting for one – normally our Twitter polls get around 3,000 votes.)

But of course Twitter polls aren’t scientific – they’re self-selecting and they draw from a biased sample, in this case people who follow Wings and are more likely to agree with us on most things. So we need a bit more data for a better picture.

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The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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