Wings Over Scotland

So, it being Good Friday, we’re definitely not going to receive our legal opinion before Monday now, so Wings Over Scotland will be shutting down, at least temporarily, on Sunday evening. No posts will be visible on the site and our Twitter account will be either locked down or deactivated while we await advice on whether either can return.

In the meantime you can hear of any developments, or get in touch, on my personal account @RevStu or on @TheGhostOfWings, both of which have had, or are about to have, all their old tweets wiped.

We’re not going to overdramatise, because we hope this is only for a few days. We’re optimistic that the Scottish Government’s abysmal, sinister and totalitarian Hate Crime Act, opposed across every sector of Scottish society and even by the police charged with implementing it, will not put an end to 12 and a half years of political journalism.

But you can’t write or tweet from a prison cell.

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Last week SNP MP Fulton MacGregor told Newsnight that the grotesque, draconian Hate Crime Act was necessary because “hate crime is a major problem across Scotland”, which “wreaks havoc on individuals, on communities and on families”.

Now, we have to admit that we hadn’t heard of much havoc being wreaked across Scotland by hate crime. Hate crime stats in Scotland have actually been falling for years  – the most recent figures for racial hatred, for example, are 31% lower than the peak year of 2011-12.

If there have been stories of rampaging mobs terrorising gay people, of a wave of violence against Sikhs, or widespread arson campaigns against Italian chip shops, they’ve escaped our attention.

But of course, the onscreen discussion focused mostly on the group that the Scottish Government is obsessed with to the exclusion of all others – transgender people.

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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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Everyone’s having a lot of fun with the farcical Hate Crime Act that will finally come into operation in Scotland in just a couple of weeks’ time, fittingly on April Fools’ Day.

Even by the Scottish Government’s abysmally rank standards of legislation over the last decade it’s an embarrassing binfire, with citizens being urged to rock up at fishmongers, mushroom farms and demolished tower blocks to report “hate crimes”.

And you’d have to laugh, except that might be a crime soon too.

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This whole clip is worth watching. It appears to be an evidence session at the Scottish Parliament featuring several members of the Scottish Government’s Expert Advisory Group On Ending Conversion Practices, with which Wings readers will be familiar.

Many things about the session are disturbing, not least the incredibly one-sided nature of both the witnesses and the committee, none of whom seem to have even a token interest in challenging the claims of the witnesses, however absurd or contentious (eg that praying for someone is basically a form of torture).

But one thing in particular leapt out at us.

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We make no apology for returning once again to the depressing subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.

Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.

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The Scottish Government’s website about its controversial and extremely disturbing new “conversion practices” legislation assures citizens that the proposal was formed after consultation with an “Expert Advisory Group”.

But all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to want you to know who they were.

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After yesterday’s disturbing article about the indoctrination of Scottish schoolchildren into transgender ideology via the Scottish Government’s proposed new “conversion practices” legislation, Wings was contacted by a number of current Scottish teachers telling us we had no idea how far it had already gone.

The message below was by no means untypical:

“This stuff around the UNCRC has been a concern for a while. Some of the articles seem to be being interpreted in ways they were never intended. It has become a vehicle for activist teachers to push their own agendas, all the while hiding behind ‘children’s rights’.

Getting certified is being pushed heavily in every school. Headteachers seem to be under a lot of pressure (coming from Scottish Government) to get it all implemented. We’re currently working towards silver.”

And we asked: getting certified for what?

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The bespectacled older person in the clip below is Aedan Wolton, a biological female (formerly called Aimie) who is the Strategic Lead for Equality at Sport England.

It’s from a 2018 BBC3 documentary called Becoming A Trans Man – Leo. The 15-year-old child in the video plays with a Rubik’s Cube as Wolton, who was 31 at the time, enthusiastically grooms her into transitioning into a “man”, advocating chest binders, a double mastectomy and the irreversible mutilation of her genitalia (“Lower surgery – you want that”) that will, Wolton confirms, lead to her permanent sterilisation, as well as the destruction of her future adult sexual function.

The BBC presents it as a heartwarming tale of friendship.

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So, just a quick one, because we’ve got Christmas shopping to do:

Since continuing to fight for the GRR was famously a “red line” for the Scottish Greens in terms of the Bute House Agreeement, do we think that the Greens will now withdraw from the governing coalition, sacrifice their ministerial cars and salaries and influence, and return to the back benches for the next two and a half years until they can try to form an alliance with Labour?

[poll id=”66″]

Well, imagine our surprise.

There was very little realistic prospect of any other outcome, particularly in light of the same judge – Lady Haldane – ruling last month that the definition of “woman” was not limited to biological reality.

In doing so she placed it beyond any credible dispute that the Scottish Government’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Act did indeed impinge on equality law reserved to the UK government, because the rules on who constituted a legal man or woman would have been different in Scotland and England.

But what now for poor beleaguered Humza Yousaf?

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