Wings Over Scotland

A few weeks ago when we said Wings was going to take a break for a bit, we also said “There may be posts now and then if something particularly significant happens”. Well, this week something particularly significant happened.

It was a development that we’d been predicting ever since Boris Johnson became UK Prime Minister, but it’s no less important for that. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that it could be the deciding factor in whether Scotland becomes independent.

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Yesterday we posted an article noting that hardline trans-rights extremists, among whose number we must regretfully count the Scottish Government, were engaged in a determined and alarmingly successful attempt to abolish the scientific basis for reality.

We did not expect such a striking illustration of that assertion to arrive this soon.

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It really is quite the remarkable feat of timing that concerted mass reporting by SNP activists managed to get the Wings Twitter account (and several others) closed down this week of all weeks, isn’t it?

They’re also trying to get my personal account banned, and reporting scores of others, in an open attempt to purge any sort of dissenting opinions from public dialogue at exactly the same time as opening a “consultation” whose outcome has already been predetermined, and which in another remarkable coincidence is due to close just a few days into the four weeks scheduled for the Alex Salmond trial.

What were the odds, eh readers?

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As some alert readers have already noticed, our Twitter account has been suspended again, three and a bit years after the last time. The ban is supposedly permanent. To save a lot of repeated explaining in emails and direct messages, a brief record of the pertinent events follows.

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One week out from a general election, the SNP are busy purging the “problematic”, as seen in this footage captured by a terrified bystander tonight somewhere in Fife.

The latest victim of the Waffen YSI, the party’s ultra-pious “woke” youth battalion, is Denise Findlay, a recently-elected member of the party’s Conduct Committee. She was targeted because she’s a gender-critical feminist opposed to the transgender cult which exerts a wildly disproportionate influence in the SNP upper echelons, supported enthusiastically by the First Minister.

She follows on the heels of Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath candidate Neale Hanvey, who last week was suspended from the party – without even a hearing – on a ludicrously trumped-up charge of “anti-Semitism” dredged up by SNP woke youth, namely that three-and-a-half years ago he shared an article (written by someone else) about billionaire financier George Soros and money-laundering, which at no point mentioned either Israel or Jewish people, even obliquely.

This led to the extraordinary farce of the SNP leader not only withdrawing all support and party funds, but publicly ordering party members not to campaign for Hanvey, in the near-certain knowledge that this would gift the seat to a Unionist party (it’s currently held, by fewer than 300 votes, by hapless Labour idiot and shadow Scottish Secretary, Lesley Laird).

Hanvey, like Findlay, was brought down not by political opponents or the media but by members of his own party, as punishment for signing the SNP Women’s Pledge.

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Dear Catherine,

You probably haven’t heard of me. I’m a notoriously “vile” political blogger who’s said a few pretty mean things on social media about politicians in the last eight years. But perhaps that’s partly because I’m a grumpy old white guy who hasn’t had the benefit of your commendable programme aimed at “building the fairer, kinder & more tolerant world the late Jo Cox MP believed in”.

I note also your pinned tweet expressing concern at women being driven out of public life, something which has been in the news very recently and which I presume includes people like Joanna Cherry MP, who has received death threats and been required to have police protection to carry out her constituency surgeries.

So I hope you’ll understand my alarm over what happened today.

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As we write this, voting has just ended to elect the membership of a number of key SNP internal bodies, including the Member Conduct Committee which has the power to discipline members and even expel them from the party.

This year has seen a concerted attempt by a small but active faction within the SNP, led by the Young Scots for Independence and Out For Indy groups, to flood the MCC (which in normal times struggles to fill its ranks) with officers aggressively committed to transgender ideology, with the openly-declared intent of purging “gender-critical” women from all party candidate lists and ensuring that anyone seeking to protect women’s sex-based rights can be expunged for “transphobia”.

(An attempt to deselect Joanna Cherry on such grounds failed earlier this year, but with control of the MCC the faction could pretty much dump anyone it wanted to.)

The matter has not escaped the attention of the independence-hostile media.

We avoided discussing the committee elections while voting was taking place because it’s not our business to interfere in the internal affairs of the SNP, and also because a certain element of the party has been having a massive tantrum over some poll results we published last week and it might have ended up being counter-productive.

But make no mistake – the outcome of these elections will have a huge impact on both the SNP’s electoral fortunes and the chances of securing independence. We’re about to find out, in other words, how screwed we are.

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Our latest Panelbase poll, conducted exclusively among SNP voters, has proven to be the most controversial we’ve ever done. So let’s see if we can get things back onto some nice safe ground: the transgender debate. (“Oh no!” – everyone)

Pictured above, front right, at the recent Dundee Pride is Shirley-Anne Somerville, the cabinet minister in charge of the second public “consultation” being held on the Scottish Government’s transgender policy. Somerville told the event that regardless of the consultation’s outcome she planned to press ahead with the “self-ID” proposals anyway, and that “trans women are women and trans men are men”. She’s almost literally nailed her colours to the mast in advance of the results – she’s wearing a jumper in the blue, pink and white horizontal stripes of the transgender flag.

And the issue of whether people with penises should be allowed to declare themselves women purely on their own say-so and access all female-only spaces unchallenged is one that’s currently tearing the SNP in two.

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I went for a very long walk before writing this post, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it in the heat of anger. But 8.5 miles and 18,753 steps later it still needs to be said and there’s no getting out of it, so batten down the hatches, folks.

Last night SNP MP Mhairi Black tweeted what may be the most ill-advised, destructive, offensive, repellent and just downright idiotic thing that I’ve ever seen an elected SNP member do. (Maybe not just the SNP.)

The video, bizarrely made for the amusement of readers of comedy lad-mag website Joe.co.uk, sees Black reading out a series of supposedly “transphobic” and “mean” tweets – almost all from women and only two of which were in any way rude – and reacting to them with a toxic mixture of arrogant condescension, mockery and insults, alongside a tirade of flatly wrong and endlessly-debunked myths.

It concludes with the smirking, sniggering suggestion that women, including survivors of male violence, who’ve expressed their serious concerns over reforms to the Gender Recognition Act – concerns shared by the overwhelming majority of women, and of the population as a whole – are “Jeremy Hunts”, a piece of rhyming slang that doesn’t need any translation.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, unfortunately, but let’s look at some highlights.

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The modern world is an ideological minefield, readers, and is increasingly almost as dangerous as a real one. Having the wrong opinions about things can easily get you fired, ostracised from polite society, arrested or beaten up, and nowhere is this more the case than in the sphere of gender politics.

The extremely brave intersex woman Claire Graham (aka @MRKHvoice on Twitter, her latest account after a series of arbitrary bannings for upsetting the wrong people with statements of biological fact) recently compiled a list of things which are now deemed “transphobic” by trans activists, and given the transience and vulnerability of anything published on Twitter, we thought it was a good idea to preserve it here, with some additions of our own and from others.

[EDIT 9 Dec 2019: Claire has of course now been permanently banned and her original list deleted by Twitter.]

We’ve previously noted how alarmingly this sort of extremist, intolerant and openly violent male bullying in the guise of progressive political correctness has been used in recent months to silence all sorts of people (mainly but not exclusively feminists).

Politicians, police and numerous other authorities in both Scotland and the UK have been complicit – whether intentionally or not – in enabling a terrifying “woke” culture of censorship and intimidation in which the wishes of the vast majority of the public are about to be simply ridden roughshod over, resulting in the creation of laws which could have (and are already having) absolutely horrific consequences.

Anyone raising issues, however, is liable to find themselves at the centre of a vicious storm of outrage, abuse or worse. So if you’re concerned about the imminent abolition of sex but want to stay out of trouble, here’s the stuff you need to avoid.

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Today is International Women’s Day, and we wouldn’t normally pay much attention to that fact because this is a Scottish politics website, not a feminist one. But the Scottish Government is currently putting itself at odds with women in a way it would have been hard to imagine when Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister, and since what Wings does specialise in is hard data – and at the request of a lot of women – we thought it was worth putting some solid numbers on a few things in our latest poll.

There wasn’t much ambiguity about them.

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The phrase “the Labour Party has gotten itself into a catastrophic mess on [X]” is a sentence you can complete with almost any subject these days, whether it’s Brexit or anti-Semitism or anti-Asian racism or factionalism or Venezuela or just about anything else under the sun, so it should be no surprise that its gender policy is no different.

The party’s stance regarding all-women shortlists is now that men can be on them, so long as they say they’re women, with no questions asked, except when Labour decide arbitrarily that they aren’t really women at all because they’re obviously really men, except for all the other occasions when they’re obviously really men.

Which seemed like a timely moment for some more new poll data.

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