Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland.

We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now. But until this month, we hadn’t felt directly under threat by it. Wings is – sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone – based in Bath, in England, and we couldn’t see how the Scottish police could come after us.

And then we read this.

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Everyone’s having a lot of fun with the farcical Hate Crime Act that will finally come into operation in Scotland in just a couple of weeks’ time, fittingly on April Fools’ Day.

Even by the Scottish Government’s abysmally rank standards of legislation over the last decade it’s an embarrassing binfire, with citizens being urged to rock up at fishmongers, mushroom farms and demolished tower blocks to report “hate crimes”.

And you’d have to laugh, except that might be a crime soon too.

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This whole clip is worth watching. It appears to be an evidence session at the Scottish Parliament featuring several members of the Scottish Government’s Expert Advisory Group On Ending Conversion Practices, with which Wings readers will be familiar.

Many things about the session are disturbing, not least the incredibly one-sided nature of both the witnesses and the committee, none of whom seem to have even a token interest in challenging the claims of the witnesses, however absurd or contentious (eg that praying for someone is basically a form of torture).

But one thing in particular leapt out at us.

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We make no apology for returning once again to the depressing subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.

Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.

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