We watched a TV documentary about the sinking of the Bismarck last week.
The most striking aspect of it was the visible and audible distress on the faces and in the voices of some of the Royal Navy sailors who’d been on the ships which sent the German battleship to the Atlantic seabed as they told the story of the final battle.
We were going to write a follow-up piece to this last week, until the SNP detonated a hand-grenade in its own trouser pocket. But with the coronation of John Swinney this afternoon after the only challenger sold out for some shiny beads and trinkets, we can get back to some serious news.
The controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which has been involved in a number of serious child sexual abuse scandals, continues to exert considerable influence on Scotland’s education system, thanks to extremely lavish funding from taxpayers – well over a million pounds from hard-pressed councils in the last year alone to address unspecified issues whose urgency is difficult to identify.
After our last piece we sent LGBTYS a letter raising our concerns about their improper interference with primary schools, something we were obliged to do before we could file a formal complaint with Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR.
We received an automated reply on 24 April saying “We are currently experiencing staff shortages and it may take up to a week to respond to your email.”
That deadline expired five days ago, and we will now be writing to the OSCR. But in the meantime LGBTYS persists in exceeding its remit, with deeply alarming results.
So there it is. In a massive, humiliating and abrupt reverse, the Scottish Greens have announced that they’ll support the Scottish Government – still led for the foreseeable future by Humza Yousaf – in this week’s confidence motion.
Shockingly enough, the debate about the Greens’ principles, intellectual consistency and integrity was an extremely brief one. Faced with the loss of their relevance and influence, they crumbled like month-old carrot cake and rushed their cards onto the table before the SNP had time to do any thinking.
Any hope Kate Forbes might have had of leading the SNP just evaporated, and so did any hope of grown-up government between now and 2026. The SNP will now spend the next two years as pathetic, grovelling puppets, doing whatever the Greens want as long as the paycheques and pension contributions keep rolling in.
It’s a tragic demise for a party that just a couple of years ago still crushed all before it in Scottish politics. But that’s showbiz, folks.
Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph has filed a series of excellent but deeply disturbing articles this month about the growing presence in Scottish primary schools of LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity which has been heavily involved in not one but two serious child abuse scandals, one of them the most horrific in Scottish history.
But LGBTYS seems to be able to do whatever it wants.
Paraphrased from points made by a number of people this morning, including Sonia Sodha of the Observer and in a letter by Joanna Cherry of the SNP and Robin Harper, former leader of the Scottish Greens to the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland:
The question is this:
In the light of the Cass Review findings, why do English children deserve evidence-based healthcare but Scottish ones don’t? Why is it okay to conduct untested, unproven medical experiments on Scottish children?
We do hope that someone in Scotland’s notoriously toothless media will ask the First Minister soon, and that he has a very convincing answer ready.
Holiday Boy is at the golfing again, so instead of a cartoon here’s something real that’s far bleaker than even he could come up with.
Because that insipid collection of about four dozen wee baldy white men is, upsettingly, the real government of Scotland.
This is from the Financial Memorandum prepared by the Scottish Government for the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021.
And here’s the reality after ONE DAY.
So that went well.
Thanks to the dedication of our legal team in working over the Easter holiday, Wings has unexpectedly received the formal Opinion of legal counsel (hereafter called “the Opinion”, capitalised to avoid confusion with the ordinary use of the word in the article) with regard to the standing of the site in the light of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which comes into force tomorrow.
We publish the Opinion below, partly to assist those worried about the Act’s impact on them but unable to afford their own legal advice.
But we also do so to place Police Scotland on notice that anything published by Wings Over Scotland is done in the light of the greatest possible care having been taken to ensure compliance with the law, and that in such a context any future attempt/s to improperly interfere with our rights of free expression under Article 10 of the European Convention On Human Rights (ECHR) will be viewed with regard to pursuing the maximum available recourse for wrongful restriction of our lawful activities.
We have both funds and the will to pursue such action.
Bookmark the links in this article, readers, because Wings might not be here tomorrow and it’s important. According to the Scottish Government, our beloved country is in the grip of a terrible epidemic of hatred. That’s plainly an unacceptable – one could also say intolerable – situation, and every last one of us must play our part to end it.
Even if that causes some administrative difficulties.
The video below, which we just found today, is taken from a promo by the American news channel CNN in 2017. It’s deeply ironic now, because CNN has been thoroughly captured by gender ideology. But it’s the reason Wings Over Scotland won’t change what or how we write, even if it means we have to shut our doors.
The truth is everything. Non-negotiable. No matter what. It’s as simple as that.
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.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
