Wings Over Scotland

Much of Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK and beyond (the story below ran in the London Standard), has been grimly gripped this week by the ongoing and scarcely believable trainwreck that is Sandie Peggie Vs NHS Fife.

The tribunal has now overrun the time allotted to it, and will reconvene for another 10 days in the second half of July, ramping up the already considerable costs incurred by NHS Fife, which is in the middle of a huge financial crisis.

According to legal experts, there is little doubt about the law surrounding the dispute. NHS Fife is clearly and unambiguously in the wrong – Dr Beth Upton, the transwoman at the centre of the problem, is legally as well as biologically male, and had no lawful entitlement to be in a female changing room. The authority also appears to be in very considerable potential trouble over failing to disclose key documents and evidence when ordered by the original judge.

So it seems remarkable that the board of NHS Fife is allowing the case to continue rather than immediately conceding to save money and any more public humiliation of both itself and its staff, like the hapless nurse manager Esther Davidson who endured a very uncomfortable two days in the witness box this week, and the clearly manifestly incompetent Equality And Human Rights Lead Officer, Isla Bumba, who yesterday deleted her LinkedIn page after being identified as the person who gave Davidson incorrect and unlawful guidance.

(Bumba is a 29-year-old immunology graduate and former bartender who ditched the challenging and gruelling field of vaccine development for a rather cushier number in pronoun-policing for £40-47,000 a year, somewhat more than the £31,000 average wage for staff nurses like Sandie Peggie, who’s been in the profession for longer than Bumba has been alive.)

Readers may reasonably wonder if the makeup of the board might offer some clues.

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For 10 years in Germany between 1935 and 1945, Jewish people were not legally human. The Nuremberg Laws, drafted in large part by Wilhelm Stuckart, established the principle in law that Jews were to be denied any rights on the basis that they were untermensch, a German word literally meaning “subhuman”.

It would be, to say the least, highly controversial for anyone to put forward in 2025 the idea that Jewish people had actually ceased to be human beings during that period, even though the various laws had been passed by a legitimately-elected government in peacetime and attracted little in the way of international condemnation.

The truth is that regardless of what the law said, Jewish people remained humans for the whole time, which is why Nazi war criminals were tried after the war for “crimes against humanity”. The passing of a law had had absolutely no effect on their biological reality. (Other than that it led to millions of them being murdered, of course.)

But anyway. Nicola Sturgeon.

Is the above how she imagined her feminist legacy, do you think, readers?

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(And Get Away With It)

You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.

Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!

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Independence is dead as a political issue in Scotland for the next few years. This much should not be in any dispute. A Labour government with a crushing majority sits firmly in Westminster with absolutely no intentions of granting a second referendum, and the SNP has loudly and clearly abandoned any other strategy.

This fact is understandably painful and difficult to come to terms with for anyone who’s devoted the last 13 years (or more) to pursuing that cause and now isn’t quite sure what to do with theirself. But for those who still aren’t ready to face up to the unpleasant reality, there’s always the comforting world of fantasy.

Because there’s always money to be made from snake oil and pie in the sky.

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We had to go and check for ourselves to make sure this really happened.

But it did.

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When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.

You also come to expect injustice, like last night’s inexplicable failure of VAR – which has unfailingly spotted micro-infringements like a player’s toenail being offside – to even take a look at a nailed-on stonewall penalty in the last minutes of the game.

But because you’re so used to these things, you’re not expecting rage.

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Holiday Boy has of course chosen the general election campaign to spend the next three weeks feeding stray cats somewhere sunny, so here’s a cartoon by the brilliant webcomicname that summarises the Baillie Gifford story for anyone joining us late.

Because, y’know, idiots.

We suppose we should talk about the general election for a bit.

It’s going to be awful. Will that do?

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The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:

Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.

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It’s probably as good an illustration of the madness currently engulfing Scottish politics as anything that the most unusual suspect, Anas Sarwar, may have just – temporarily at least – saved Humza Yousaf’s job.

And although our head hurts already, we’ll try to explain why.

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The Cass Review into gender medicine, which has been almost six long years in the making, was finally published this morning, and despite the fears of some – including us – that it was going to be watered down, it’s turned out to be an absolutely explosive document even on a quick skim. (It’s 388 pages long.)

The most damning aspect, though, is almost certainly this one:

Those quotes annihilate any concept of an “innocent good intentions” defence for the gender clinics. Because if you genuinely believe that you’re doing good, you don’t try to bury all the evidence.

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Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland.

We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now. But until this month, we hadn’t felt directly under threat by it. Wings is – sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone – based in Bath, in England, and we couldn’t see how the Scottish police could come after us.

And then we read this.

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