Wings Over Scotland

Joanna Cherry’s been on a mission on the airwaves today.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch. The truth usually is.

We watched Question Time last night for the first time in about nine years, and this comment from SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn raised an eyebrow.

Because we couldn’t remember ANY times that Flynn had publicly expressed any problems with the Scottish Greens during their governing alliance.

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Well, what a nice statement of unity and tolerance this is:

And only slightly undermined by coming from THIS guy:

But Smith’s new message of tolerance hasn’t fully penetrated the party ranks.

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We’ve already posted a shorter and snappier soundbite from this video on our Twitter, but it’s really worth watching the full version here:

Because the body language is remarkable. For three and a half minutes, Neil Gray is completely unable to look his former colleague – an SNP MSP until a few months ago, a fellow government minister until 2022 –  in the eye.

He sits stiff as a board, his teeth gritted, his face like thunder, staring directly ahead at the back wall of the studio as Ash Regan patiently and calmly outlines the extremely modest requirements Alba had set out in return for supporting Humza Yousaf and the SNP government in Parliamentary votes of confidence.

And when host Stephen Jardine asks him what exactly was so unreasonable about them, he can’t help himself, and blurts out that it was really all about preventing Alex Salmond from regaining any sort of influence on Scottish politics and insisting that his “rehabilitation” could not be permitted, even if the result of blocking it was the loss of an SNP First Minister and the potential bringing down of an SNP government.

And at this point a fair-minded person might ask: rehabilitation from what, precisely?

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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.

We tweeted this last night as a teaser for our big exclusive. (Which is now hilariously being claimed by Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record seven hours later.)

And it does now seem to be the case that the news is that the SNP are ending the Bute House Agreement and kicking out the Greens before the Greens do it first.

And what that tells us, for a starter, is that the SNP’s once-legendary skill in news management really is now well and truly on fire, as in “bin”.

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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.

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We unreservedly applaud the swiftness with which the office of the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament have delivered this answer, something which other bodies in Scotland could learn from.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

The content of it, however, is more disturbing.

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Truth matters in public life.

So we’ve sent the letter below to the Scottish Parliament this morning.

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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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So here’s a thing.

But that’s not how the Hate Crime Act is supposed to work.

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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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