Wings Over Scotland

Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.

BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)

On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)

She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.

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More than a day on from our disturbing exposé of how the Scottish Parliament has been captured by a tiny, sleazy nest of pornographers, drug addicts, fetishists and abusers, there still hasn’t been a single comment distancing themselves from the group by any of the MSPs identified in the article, including Patrick Harvie, Ross Greer, Joe Fitzpatrick, Paul Sweeney and most notably Alex Cole-Hamilton, who made the remarkable public statement that MSPs were directly and specifically passing gender reform laws for the benefit of male sex worker and violent serial abuser Beth Douglas.

We’ve asked Alex Cole-Hamilton for comment several times without reply. (Although there has been an unverified third-hand answer via Willie Rennie and a Twitter user.)

Wings Over Scotland makes absolutely no assertions about why MSPs wouldn’t want to very clearly and unambiguously disassociate themselves from such an unpleasant character after information about him had been brought to light in a widely-read (over 200,000 views) article which was trending on Twitter all day yesterday.

For the avoidance of doubt, we have no information about any interactions between Douglas and any MSPs that we’re keeping secret. But we’re not the least bit surprised that people have started wondering what possible reasons a whole string of male politicians could have for not wanting to upset a male prostitute, particularly given the long and sordid history of male politicians and male prostitutes in the UK.

To quash such speculation, we once again urge all MSPs who have associated with Beth Douglas to clearly and publicly disavow him and assure voters that he will no longer shape or influence legislation passed in the Scottish Parliament.

It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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Our favourite of many amusing responses on Twitter today to the string of SNP MPs, MSPs and assorted other apparatchiks falling over themselves to say that they walked around yesterday’s anti-feminist protest in Glasgow with their eyes wide shut:

Wings will have a major article related to the subject dropping tomorrow morning, put together in conjunction with The Glinner Update. Please do tune in from 8am.

The final result of our Twitter poll from yesterday was pretty conclusive.

(It was also by a distance the biggest response we can ever remember getting for one – normally our Twitter polls get around 3,000 votes.)

But of course Twitter polls aren’t scientific – they’re self-selecting and they draw from a biased sample, in this case people who follow Wings and are more likely to agree with us on most things. So we need a bit more data for a better picture.

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The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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…by which we mean “IQs in the history of the Scottish Parliament”.

Put a cushion on your desk before you start listening to this, gang, or you might hurt your jaw. Because surely nobody quite as paralysingly, catastrophically thick as this clueless, bumbling, deranged and dangerous imbecile has ever been allowed to make the laws of Scotland before. We wouldn’t let her make orange squash, to be honest.

And yes, we’re including Kezia Dugdale and Jamie Greene in that reckoning.

(If you weren’t aware, the UK government HAS now decided to use a Section 35 order to block the appalling Gender Recognition Reform bill. We support it wholeheartedly.)

The release of some early 2021 census statistics relating to gender was greeted with glee and elation by Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall in the UK. Vindication at last!

(Kelley declined to mention that her figure of 262,000 was substantially less than half the number of trans and non-binary individuals – 600,000 – that her organisation has habitually claimed for years.)

The census suggested that England and Wales are home to 48,000 transwomen (and 48,000 transmen), from the total who’d answered No to the voluntary question asking if their gender identity aligned with their sex at birth.

(The largest number that said No, around 118,000, didn’t tick the boxes of either transwoman, transman or non-binary, nor wrote in their own. An unknown number of these may have been rejecting “gender” altogether. 30,000 ticked “non-binary” and 18,000 wrote in a gender because they were REALLY special.)

But, as we’ve been told times out of number, we must accept what people say about themselves. So 48,000 transwomen it is. So few. So vulnerable. And that number got me thinking.

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Alert readers of Wings will know that I have a fondness for sweet and fruity things, and a particular favourite of mine are Tropical Vibes still lemonades. (NB Other drinks are available, this site is in no way sponsored by or financially affiliated to Tropical Vibes.)

I especially like their Ocean Blue variety, a deliciously sharp and tangy refresher which contains real blueberry juice.

Just not very MUCH real blueberry juice.

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The response to our post of last night has been astonishing.

(Although we’re not sure how “new followers” is being calculated there. We actually have more than 500 extra followers since 8pm – we can only assume that it’s only counting those who right-clicked and followed from that specific tweet.)

And part of the reason is that it’s plain that almost nobody knew about the report, even though it came out three months ago (when Wings was still in retirement). We had to dig deep to find any media coverage of it at all, and what there was was cursory at best, and sometimes a lot worse.

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As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.

At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.

Today is the second kind of day.

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Alert readers may have noticed that our Twitter account has returned again. Hopefully this time it’ll last longer than a week under the inevitable barrage of attacks from transactivists and SNP MSPs.

(We haven’t had any contact from Twitter about it, people just noticed the account was live again last night and told us about it, so we don’t know what the reason was.)

And someone used the occasion to point out that it was exactly five years ago today that we published our first piece on the subject of “gender reform”.

It’s still quite a shocking read even half a decade down the line.

We’ve only actually had 93 posts on trans issues in those five years, or an average of about one every three weeks. We know it feels like more. And we know that some of you thought we’d gone mad when we started warning about it.

But hopefully some of you have realised just what’s at stake, and even if you don’t care about that, how much it might cost the cause of independence. We really hope we can stop talking about it soon, if only so we don’t keep getting banned from Twitter.