The Alba Party tonight released its official policy manifesto on equalities. We attach it below for the benefit of voters, particularly those concerned by the other parties’ positions on women’s rights. The highlighting is ours.
Not for the first time, a certain section of society in Scotland and elsewhere is today engaged in the furious insistence that words don’t mean what they actually mean.
The words above are not ambiguous. They call for the “elimination” of “all laws limiting [the] legal capacity of adolescents […] to consent to sex”. The only laws which limit the legal capacity of adolescents – people aged from 10 to 19, according to both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations – to consent to sex are age of consent laws. The clue is somewhat in the name.
If organisations don’t want those laws abolished so that 10-year-olds can have sex, then they shouldn’t sign their names to statements saying that they do.
While watching reports from the Alba Party women’s conference that took place this afternoon, we saw something that we thought must be wrong.
But it wasn’t.
If you still can’t see it, you’re probably never going to wake up.
But have a little think about those highlighted words this morning anyway.
…you’re not paying attention. Real images from last night’s SNP broadcast:
It’s not a cult, though. The whole thing can be seen here.
It’s probably past time that we put this all in one post for easy reference.
Herald journalists with no idea what a story is, start here.
Hindsight is 20/20, readers, but perhaps we ought to have paid a little more attention to the article below back in 2015.
Because as the old saying goes: when people tell you who they are, believe them.
At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.
Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.
This is an utterly extraordinary tweet.
The three people who were asking to see the SNP’s books weren’t Sean Clerkin, they were MEMBERS OF THE SNP’S FINANCE & AUDIT COMMITTEE. That is, they were people whose actual literal job is to monitor the SNP’s finances, and who are all drawn from the membership of the SNP.
So what Hunter is saying there is that the SNP chose three of its own members to serve on its own finance committee, yet they could not be allowed to carry out their duties because their loyalties did not lie with the party.
In which case, a reasonable observer might very well ask, what sort of stupendously, farcically incompetent organisation puts such people in such positions?
Fresh from being embarrassed over a ridiculous smear story this week about someone complaining to the police about the use of a well-known political phrase by a Wings commenter, Tom Gordon of the Herald went on quite the attack yesterday.
The thread, which contains a number of basic factual errors about events*, continued for several more tweets all generally rubbishing our scoop from Friday afternoon and suggesting that no proper journalist (“the rest of us”) would have run the story.
So he must be feeling quite left out this morning.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
