Wings Over Scotland

In relation to yesterday’s article, we’ve now filed the following with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.

I request a review of this decision.

Firstly, I wish to note that since the response I received was a wholly generic one containing no reference or relevance to any of the specifics of my case, it should not have taken until the 28th day of the 28-day deadline to deliver. This appears to be a deliberate stalling tactic.

The information I sought did not involve the disclosure of any sensitive identities or data. It is in fact an attempt to establish the answer to an extremely basic question of first principles: why is LGBT Youth Scotland operating so far outwith its stated remit?

Since the fact that it IS doing so is not in any question – its own public statements declare that it is operating widely and openly in primary schools – it is a matter of plain and overwhelming public interest that this glaring anomaly be explained. The charity itself refuses to do so, or even to enter into any discussion of the matter, so it becomes a matter for its ostensible regulator.

Since the public is unable to ask the OSCR to speak on behalf of LGBTYS, the only remaining option to achieve transparency, accountability and public confidence is to seek the information requested and thereby discern the answer via the OSCR.

Particularly given LGBTYS’s unfortunate record of involvement with extremely serious child abuse, and its highly controversial position on matters such as “puberty blockers” – on which it is starkly at odds with the stated position of the Scottish Government – this matter cannot simply be swept under the carpet and the public ordered to mind its own business. Someone, somewhere, at some level of Scottish civic life, must answer the question:

Why is an organisation whose remit concerns intrinsically sexual matters and exclusively encompasses 13-25-year-olds being allowed to operate in primary (and indeed nursery) schools and discuss such sexual matters with children 10 years below its minimum stipulated age range?

Given LGBTYS’s refusal, that duty then lies with the OSCR, and it should not evade it. The public deserves to know both that OSCR has in fact complied with its own responsibilities and carried out a satisfactory investigation, and what the outcome of that investigation was, given that nothing has changed in respect of the charity’s actions since concerns were raised with the OSCR a year ago and LGBTYS continues to far exceed its stated brief.

There are in this case no redactions which would reveal any sort of information that would place anyone at risk. The identities of LGBTYS and/or OSCR employees could be safely redacted if appropriate, while the substance of the discussion remained visible. What matters is that the question was asked, and that the public be told the answer.

None of OSCR’s stated objections to answering the FOI request are pertinent to this particular enquiry. It has no valid excuse to refuse. We fully expect it to do so anyway, because nobody in Scotland is answerable for anything any more. But we’re required to give them another 28 days to waste everyone’s time before we approach the only person in Scotland who appears to still believe in their civic and professional duty: the Information Commissioner.

Barring a miracle, we’ll see you on the 15th of May, readers.

Alert readers will recall that Wings has for the past year been attempting to establish why controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland is being allowed to operate in primary schools across Scotland, discussing sexual matters with children as young as four, despite only being supposed to deal with young people aged between 13 and 25.

Having received no response from multiple emails to the charity, we raised the matter with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator last year, and heard nothing from them about the results of their investigation – or indeed, come to that, about whether they’d actually conducted an investigation at all.

So a month ago we sent them a Freedom Of Information request to find out. At the last possible second before the deadline to reply expired, the OSCR have this morning deigned to grace us with their response, which you can read below.

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It’s increasingly common now for the Scottish news to feature another prison scandal or employment-tribunal judgment highlighting the extent of gender-ideology capture in the country’s public authorities.

But it’s normally quite hard to get an overall picture of just how captured any particular public body really is, so we should offer some thanks to the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) who’ve helpfully provided us with a comprehensive primer in the form of a briefing for a board update later this week.

Innocent readers might have thought that the people managing a national park would be most concerned about attracting visitors, protecting wildlife, repairing paths and keeping local businesses sustainable, that sort of thing. But that’s not how things work in Scotland any more.

Because the CNPA are about to present the organisation’s 19 board members with an 91-page report and annex detailing all their vital work on… equalities issues.

Y’know, in case Ben Macdui isn’t queer enough.

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So as promised, and having now spent 11 months trying to get answers any other way, this afternoon we had a live chat with controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland.

Below is how it went.

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In April last year we wrote to LGBT Youth Scotland asking them to explain why they were conducting activities in primary schools (and even with pre-school children) about sexual matters despite only having a remit to work with young people aged 13-25.

We received no reply, so we contacted the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, who sent a rather sniffy acknowledgement saying:

“If your concern leads us to making inquiries with the charity, we are unable to update you on the status of those inquiries. For more information about what to expect after you submit a concern, read our guidance on how OSCR deals with concerns and inquiries.”

That link, you’ll be amazed to hear, leads to a dead page.

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You know what, Surrey Live, we think you’re probably right.

We DO think people will remember him.

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The Presiding Officer has finally reluctantly deigned to allow the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issues arising from Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife, in the shape of a debate taking place in the chamber this afternoon brought forward by the Scottish Tories.

We suspect that watching it will be profound waste of time and a grave danger to our monitor screens, but we’ll certainly at least tune in for the votes at the end, because which motion/amendment the Parliament puts its name to will be a revealing moment.

Let’s quickly run those through a translator.

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It’s one of the most profoundly disappointing things about the last decade of Scottish politics that for about five minutes in 2015 we all thought that this awful dunderheaded foghorn was a bright new hope for the future.

But you live and learn. At least, some of us do.

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In April 2021, the SNP were still the undisputed masters of all they surveyed. A poll conducted by Ipsos MORI that month showed them on 53% of the vote for the Scottish Parliament, a jawdropping 33 points ahead of their nearest rivals.

When the Holyrood election a month later was held, they won 64 seats, one more than they had done in 2016. Yet despite having led a minority government without any significant difficulties for the preceding five years, Nicola Sturgeon chose to invite the Greens to form a coalition with her party, and the effect that had on the public’s view of the government was… well, let’s see.

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We actually agree with John Swinney here.

The law – more specifically the Workplace (Health, Safety, and Welfare) Regulations 1992 –  is indeed “crystal clear”. It states, wholly unambiguously, that men and women must be provided with separate single-sex changing facilities, which could under NO lawful conditions include Dr “Beth” Upton and nurse Sandie Peggie at the same time.

The difficulty is that any minute now, someone is going to ask the beleaguered First Minister the staggeringly obvious question that arises from the fact, namely:

Why didn’t NHS Fife know that?

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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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As alert Wings readers will know, we’re fond of a WW2 analogy from time to time. The conflict is so extensively documented, and so deeply embedded in British culture (for both good and ill), that it’s a reliable tool for getting points across concisely and clearly.

(It’s also one of the last major wars in which, overall, the good guys and the bad guys were pretty indisputably easy to identify.)

So let’s keep that in mind for a moment while we look at this.

And then let’s talk about Stalingrad.

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