We held back from writing about yesterday’s judgment from Lady Dorrian in the Court Of Session in the hope that if we stared at it for long enough we could get it to make some kind of sense. But it does not. On the face of it, the country’s second-most-senior judge is simply a drooling imbecile.
Because that submission is not the least bit difficult to follow.
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.
Last night a by-election hustings was held in Rutherglen to which all 14 candidates were invited to hear and answer questions from the electorate on women’s issues. The SNP, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates all declined to attend. But the SNP, at least, was represented at the event.
The Scottish National Party, in legal character, is what’s known as an unincorporated association. (The same form of entity as Wings, local colour fans.)
I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.
They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.
Scotland’s biggest cultural problem famously used to be with its alpha males: hard-working, hard-drinking men, often sexist and openly sectarian, with an easy propensity for violence. (The archetype cut right across every social class, from shipyard workers to high-ranking police officers and everywhere between and beyond.)
But times change, and thankfully those characters are now almost entirely a thing of the past. Less happily, though, they’ve simply been replaced by a breed that’s every bit as unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. Readers, meet the Beta Bullies.
Slacky The Holiday Boy is off for the next THREE weeks, gallivanting around the globe on the clearly excessive wages we’re paying him. We hope he does actually come back, because his home city is becoming a poisonously hostile place for the creative.
Around 300 years ago, Edinburgh was the birthplace and residence of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual and scientific accomplishment built around “the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason”, and which led to the city being famously dubbed “the Athens of the North”.
As far as we’re aware, LGBT Youth Scotland remains under police investigation for the suspected grooming and sexual exploitation of children. It’s impossible to imagine any other sort of organisation that could still expect to enjoy the patronage of a First Minister under such circumstances – especially when there were obvious other places he could be reasonably expected to show his face – but that’s how the SNP’s priorities roll in 2023 and there’s no getting away from it.
For any question to do with independence, folks, Humza Yousaf is not the answer.