Wings Over Scotland

At the weekend, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman was filmed applauding as a notoriously unhinged transactivist ranted through a megaphone to a small and almost exclusively male crowd of protestors about how he was going to openly break the law by continuing to use women’s public toilets, and addressing JK Rowling with the words “We should all take a shite on you, you heinous creeping old bitch”.

At another protest, Chapman herself asserted that the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was motivated by not by a solemn consideration of the law or by the arguments of counsel who appeared before it, but by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.

Chapman is – incredibly – Deputy Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, and as such her comments sparked a storm of wholly justified outrage over her flagrant breach not only of Parliamentary rules but also of the law – specifically the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which requires all MSPs to uphold the independence of the judiciary.

But Chapman today refused to back down.

And the call for consequences has grown far beyond the usual suspects.

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Regular readers of Wings won’t need any reminding that Dani Garavelli of the Herald is, among some very stiff competition, one of the most contemptible pieces of nightsoil currently operating in the Scottish media.

But if you’re new here, we can give you a quick illustration.

If the sneering piety of that opening paragraph made you feel a little revolted, a bit angry and somewhat nauseous, then congratulations, because that means you’re still something minimally approximating to a decent human being. But unfortunately it gets a lot worse from there.

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Scottish Greens candidate and transactivist Matt “Ellie” Gomersall, with whom Wings readers will be familiar, appeared on the Jeremy Vine show today and blundered straight into an elephant trap a myopic mole could have seen coming on a foggy night.

Having just embarked on a diatribe in which he dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea that predatory men would ever pretend to be transwomen to gain access to vulnerable women, Vine asked him about Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, the convicted double rapist that even hapless Humza Yousaf felt able to confidently assert was “at it”.

Having just painted himself into a corner, Gomersall was then embarrassingly unable to disown Bryson as a “real” transwoman, thereby implicitly admitting that transwomen do indeed present a danger to women in exactly the same way that predatory men do, and torpedoing his entire core point that it was unfair to “discriminate” against them in exactly the same way single-sex spaces discriminate against non-trans men.

(Outrageously, earlier in the speech he’d tried to claim that it was only natural that some transwomen would be sex offenders because some biological women were.)

It’s tempting to believe that Gomersall was demonstrating an intellectual vacuum by making such vacuously cretinous arguments and failing to spot even the most obvious pitfalls in them, but the truth is far worse. Gomersall, and people like him, know that they’re lying (which is why they always try to silence opponents), but they lack the moral courage to face up to the fact that the inevitable price of their lies is vulnerable women being raped by what he revoltingly waves away as “fringe cases”.

All rapists are fringe cases. 95% of men would never dream of raping anyone. But we discriminate against ALL men in women’s spaces because you can’t tell which ones are rapists by looking. Men like “Ellie” Gomersall, though, think that the price of a few women being raped is worth paying to validate their delusions and fetishes (in his case, the creepy fetish of skinwalking as his pretty sister), and they don’t even have the shred of decency to bother coming up with a coherent line of bullshit to cover it.

Let’s take a passing moment just to reflect on how grotesque this is.

When she was leader, Sturgeon forced MPs and MSPs like Michelle Thomson and Mark McDonald – neither of whom were even spoken to by police, let alone arrested or questioned or charged – out of the SNP lest even the mere suggestion of wrongdoing bring shame on the party.

She is still under police investigation on suspicion of EMBEZZLING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF POUNDS FROM THE SNP, and her husband and former party CEO has actually been charged with it. She is personally on record, on video, ordering the NEC not to question the state of party finances at the time of the alleged offences.

Yet not only has she had the lack of class not to resign the whip voluntarily, not only has she shown no interest in turning up and doing the job for the last two years, but she’s actually put herself forward to stand again, and doddering, spineless caretaker John Swinney hasn’t had the stones to put a stop to it.

Nobody thinks she’s even going to actually run next year – she spends most of her time gallivanting around celebrity events talking about her life after politics – so she’s just wasting everyone’s time and trolling.

Nobody in history has ever taken the SNP for a ride as cynically as this. But the party is so rotten and broken and weak that it just meekly goes along with it, and yet still dares to pretend it’s up to the rather tougher task of making Scotland independent.

We have no words for anyone still stupid enough to believe in it.

From here, the top of the barrel is so far away that you can’t see so much as a pinprick of daylight through the most powerful pair of binoculars.

In a moving epitaph a few days ago, the widely-respected Professor James Mitchell of the University Of Glasgow noted of Alex Salmond that:

“He could be irascible and did not put up with fools […] He was impatient with lazy journalism […] and did not hide it. We can still see the consequences in some of the obituaries and commentary that reveal more about the writers than the subject”.

Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine concurred, saying:

“In the clamour for commentators to vent their loathing, there have been too many sour column inches that have framed a man’s premature death around the egos of the journalists that have penned them.

Too great an appetite to rescue the words that were once filed and then spiked following a trial that didn’t give them the verdict they had prepared for. Too much haste to use his passing as the opportunity to seek revenge for a tongue-lashing or a put-down that they had never forgotten.”

And so, then, to Carlos Alba.

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Wherever you find giants, you also find parasites, bottom-feeders and carrion. When a mighty lion dies in the jungle, tiny creeping crawling maggots and insects and bacteria feast gleefully on its corpse for many days.

Which naturally brings us to the Scottish media.

The above paragraphs of cowardly innuendo and baseless speculative smearing were penned by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Monday. (They’re not from the ironically-headed “Appreciation” that the same two hacks wrote for Sunday’s Observer, in which they audaciously claimed that Salmond’s success was down to Nicola Sturgeon).

They sneakily imply that Salmond was guilty not only of the sexual assaults of which he was cleared in court, but also of an unspecified number of unnamed others, and make assertions of “disturbing evidence about his personal conduct” without specifying what that evidence or conduct might have been.

Naively, we’d imagined that as repulsive as those lines are – though not surprising, as Brooks has always been a keen participant in the whispering campaign from allies of Sturgeon trying to discredit the trial verdict – they were as bad as things would get.

We weren’t even close.

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Holiday Boy is at the golfing again, so instead of a cartoon here’s something real that’s far bleaker than even he could come up with.

Because that insipid collection of about four dozen wee baldy white men is, upsettingly, the real government of Scotland.

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Well, this’d bring a tear to a glass eye.

Yeah, whatever DID happen to that?

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The average prison term for rape in Scotland is just under seven years. So we really don’t want to think about what Andrew “Amy George” Miller did to the poor young girl he abducted to get 20. (Indeed, strictly speaking 28.)

Miller wasn’t charged with rape, the 11-year-old was described as “safe and well” when the police found her and she was missing for just over one day. Miller also entered a guilty plea. So our blood runs cold at the thought of what must have happened in those 27 hours to nevertheless attract such a huge sentence, and we hope never to know.

But there are some things we DO want explained.

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Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.

(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month.)

For around 40 years of my life, I had an easy one-word answer to being asked if I was in favour of independence for Scotland, and that answer was “Yes”. If you’d pushed me to expand, I’d have said “Yes, obviously“.

Even though my dad was employed by the SNP leader of the time – in his non-SNP capacity as a business owner – politics wasn’t discussed in our house. (These were the 1970s, so there wasn’t a vast amount of discussion full stop.) But I was raised, basically by default, with the view that Scotland was a country.

Of course it was a country. It had its own dialect and an identifiable culture, both things personified to my young self by Oor Wullie and The Broons, and our weekly visits to my granny’s wooden bungalow in a wee ancient village near Cumbernauld that may as well have been Auchenshoogle (weirdly, sometimes “Auchentogle”).

It had national football and rugby teams. It had a flag. Why would it be any less of a country than Germany or Italy or Holland or Brazil or Argentina? (My knowledge of geography was primarily World Cup-based.)

So as soon as I had even the vaguest notion of the concept of politics – probably around the age of 7 or 8 – it seemed straightforwardly axiomatic to me that it should be independent. There was never even a thought process, it was just mad and unnatural to think otherwise, like believing the sea was orange. Countries run their own affairs, right? And that was it for the next 40-odd years.

(Post-2007, when I started to seriously examine the idea, the feeling only solidified.)

But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer is different. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.

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Even quite alert Wings readers may not recall our brush with thoroughly obnoxious SNP councillor (and former chair of the misleadingly-named Aberdeen Independence Movement) Fatima Joji, because it happened such a long time ago.

But sometimes when someone behaves particularly egregiously in their professional role you have to at least give the proper grievance procedures a try (although it can prove very expensive to do so), and 13 months ago that’s what we did. We still have no idea how close we may be to the end of the process, but we have an update.

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