Wings Over Scotland

Colette Walker is leader of the Independence for Scotland Party, and registered blind.

“There exists a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’

To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'” – GK Chesterton

I started writing this post two weeks ago, incensed at the behaviour of the SNP NEC and their proposals to introduce self-ID for disability. Then they sacked Joanna Cherry from the front bench.

Joanna Cherry is probably one of the few people left in the SNP exec that even knows what Chesterton’s Fence is, and its importance in lawmaking. As a gay woman, she understands on a practical level the issues round equality legislation.

It also means that she’s a particular target for certain groups. Ye shall know a genius by this sign; all the dunces of the world are in confederacy against her.

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Two weeks ago a Wings scoop caused quite a furore to erupt around the SNP’s ham-fisted and corruptly-motivated attempts to increase BAME and disabled representation at this year’s Holyrood election.

We’ve always been opposed to what were until recently known as “quotas”, and prior to that “positive discrimination”, but have now been cunningly rebranded as “diversity and inclusion” because that’s a much more difficult thing to say you object to.

It’s easy to make an honourable-sounding case against any form of “discrimination”, because decent and civilised people are taught to automatically think of discrimination as a bad thing, even if you put “positive” in front of it.

So the word “quotas” was adopted to move the concept from a pejorative term to a neutral noun – objecting to “quotas” doesn’t sound intolerant, any more than objecting to (say) “procedures” does. So that’s fine, because you can still discuss it like adults without too much unpleasantness.

But those pushing the agenda got smarter still by changing the name again. If you say you object to “diversity and inclusion”, you sound like a monster and a racist, because diversity and inclusion are plainly good things – no decent person wants to live in a monoculture, or to exclude anybody from society – and so the debate is immediately drowned out by self-righteous tossers screaming “BIGOT!” and “NAZI!” at everyone.

And yet in the context of social policy the three phrases mean the exact same thing. They’re all systems for overriding raw democracy so as to increase the representation of selected groups at the expense of other groups, for one reason or another.

(Sometimes it’s ostensibly just penance for historical wrongs, while at other times it’s supposedly for economic benefits, and so on.)

And while the proponents of those systems will openly argue that the only group being disadvantaged is straight white men so it’s all fine (because nobody likes straight white men and anyone standing up for them can be easily dismissed as a “gammon” for lots of woke points and Twitter likes), it isn’t even remotely close to the truth.

Because in “diversity and inclusion”, some groups are a lot more included than others.

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The two main centres of infection for the woke entryist poison currently disfiguring the SNP are Stirling and Aberdeen, where they coalesce around two Westminster MPs – Twitler Youth gauleiter Alyn Smith and the worryingly unhinged Kirsty Blackman.

In recent months Wings has documented numerous attempts by the faction (which is chiefly characterised by its hyper-extremist and fundamentalist version of transgender ideology) to gerrymander and fix the party’s internal election processes to ensure that its disciples – who are enormously unpopular among the grassroots membership and have repeatedly failed to win by playing fair – get selected as candidates.

But now they’re really scraping the barrel.

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It’s our sad duty to report this fact to you, readers: our experience of sending Freedom Of Information requests to the Scottish Government is basically that the more answers you get from them, the less information you end up having.

See below for a case in point.

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In an attempt to freshen up its usual panel of tired and tiresome politicians and pundits, last night’s Question Time (ostensibly from an oddly-vague location in “the North East”) featured moderately-known circus fortune-teller Gypsy Rose Petulengro, crossing her palm with silver for some analysis in a short break from one of her celebrated seances.

The clip above was her take on whether Nicola Sturgeon would resign if either of the current inquiries found that she’d systematically and repeatedly lied to Parliament and broken the Ministerial Code, and the strange thing about it was that for someone who was professing to be looking into the future, she didn’t even appear to know the basic pertinent facts of the present or the past.

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So it looks like The Spectator spent a lot of money on a lawyer for nothing today.

Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.

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The Spectator’s application to the High Court for a variation of the anonymity order in HM Advocate vs Alexander Salmond has just finished. It seems to have been agreed by all parties that Lady Dorrian will now amend her order to read thus:

“An order at common law and in terms of section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, preventing publication of the names and identity and any information likely to disclose the identity of the complainers in the case of HMA v Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond, as such complainers in those proceedings.”

The newly-added words are highlighted in bold.

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After all the dramatic revelations at FMQs yesterday, something else really quite weird happened after everyone had stopped watching.

Once more, we’re in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Jackie Baillie.

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We suppose this is a sort of compliment, in at least two senses.

The second of them, of course, being the sheer surprise of some people at discovering that not everyone is as cynical and devious as they evidently are themselves.

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So this was a bit odd.

Once again we’ve clipped the entire question and “answer” so you can see nothing’s been taken out of context, but the important bit is from 2m 30s to 2m 53s.

Davidson’s question was quite complex but boiled down to why Nicola Sturgeon hadn’t properly recorded details and minutes of meetings on Scottish Government business, in direct breach of the Ministerial Code.

That’s a valid question in itself, to which there was no meaningful response, but it was what Sturgeon said right at the end that raised our eyebrows.

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First Minister’s Questions was very interesting today. Ruth Davidson had some tricky ones which Nicola Sturgeon simply didn’t even attempt to look like she was answering, and we might come back to one of them in particular a little later on.

But Jackie Baillie’s were even more pointed, especially this one:

With our trademark scrupulous fairness we’ve included the full question and answer, and they raise a whole series of issues, but if you’re in a hurry the key part we want to talk about right now is between 0.18 and 0.26.

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