Wings Over Scotland

Last night we tweeted this:

We did so because we’d just been told – by a completely random source – that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney would both resign today, and Brown would be the interim leader while a replacement was elected. We’d never spoken to this person before, but the manner in which they said it made us take it more seriously than all the “someone told me” rumours we get told and ignore every other day.

As yet only the first part has been confirmed, but you have to admit that our source is looking pretty darn hot right now.

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The First Minister has gotten herself into quite a pickle.

But worse, there’s no way out of it.

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Get ready to curl your toes, readers, as the excellent journalist and author Ella Whelan puts economy-grade script-reading robot Jenny Gilruth of the SNP on the spot during tonight’s Question Time.

Despite having watched Nicola Sturgeon be tied in embarrassing knots by Douglas Ross on the same question hours earlier, Gilruth was powerless to deviate from the line that self-declared “transgender” rapists are a mysterious and separate species, neither male nor female – Schrodinger’s Rapists, if you will – because otherwise the SNP’s entire gender reform ideology dissolves instantly into mist.

Bepenised individuals who rape women – will we EVER know what they are? Judging by the groans of the studio audience as she blustered away vacuously, everyone in the room but Jenny Gilruth was already pretty sure.

We’re very busy today, but there’s always time for a chuckle.

She’s going to need to buy a ticket to get back into the stadium after that.

We’re not experts in the field, but we think this is what an actual feminist looks like.

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It’s been hard to avoid the puffy, perpetually-smirking face of Edinburgh transactivist Beth Douglas, the co-convener of the Rainbow Greens, recently. He’s been all over the media, from Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live to The National (print and podcast) to Penis News to various national TV bulletins, and interviewed by Owen Jones.

Last week he was prominent in a protest outside Queen Elizabeth House against the UK government’s S35 intervention over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He spoke alongside MSPs including Patrick Harvie, Karen Adam, Ross Greer, Paul Sweeney and Alex Cole-Hamilton, who lavished fulsome and effusive praise on him, going so far as to say that it was for Douglas personally that MSPs had pushed the bill through.

But Douglas wasn’t always called Beth.

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Footage from tonight’s glamorous dinner for the captains of the independence industry.

See you same time next year for the same speech again, gang.

In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.

At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.

But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.

And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.

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Things change very slowly, then very suddenly. Here’s to better days, readers.

Past and future.

The last few days have been perhaps the most turbulent in the entire history of the modern Scottish Parliament. Proceedings have been suspended repeatedly, members of the public thrown out and threatened with arrest, filibusters attempted, carol services cancelled, tempers frayed and sittings going on until the wee small hours.

All of this has happened in the service of the policy that the SNP has made its flagship priority for the last two years and more – the destruction not only of women’s rights, but of the very CONCEPT of a woman.

So you’d imagine the party would have been tweeting about it constantly, keeping its supporters informed about all the dramatic events and the progress of the bill, if only to reassure them that they were determined to get it passed before the Christmas break come what may.

And yet strangely, up until it retweeted a tweet from The National about the bill finally passing a few minutes ago, the SNP Twitter account had not made a single mention of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in the entirety of the last week.

It certainly hadn’t been quiet – it’s been churning out scores and scores of tweets on subjects from the NHS to Rwanda deportations, the COP15 summit, Brexit, early learning, FMQs, winter fuel payments, International Human Solidarity Day, train fares, independence polls, the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, free school meals, income tax, drugs, net zero, industrial disputes, the cost of living and dozens more.

But there wasn’t one solitary word about the thing it just spent three solid days forcing into law. And since it was a thing that most of its own voters, and indeed a huge majority of all Scots, were opposed to, readers might be forgiven for thinking that they just wanted it all kept as quiet as possible, as if they were ashamed.

We suspect, and very much hope, that their wish may not be granted.

To its eternal disgrace, the University Of Edinburgh is trying to prevent this excellent film from being shown in Scotland, as part of a systematic campaign of suppression and censorship that starts from the highest offices of the Scottish Government and works its way down through academia, the arts and the civic sector.

It deserves to be seen and supported.

Word reaches us, readers, that Nicola Sturgeon was “furious” when she joined the most recent meeting of the SNP’s Westminster group by Skype. Her rage was driven by the suggestion that the party should trigger a Holyrood election to act as a de facto independence referendum, a policy we’re reliably told is supported by a number of MPs who are too scared of being browbeaten by Sturgeon in front of their colleagues to actually speak out in favour of it.

(We won’t mention their names at this point.)

Our source mentioned to us that they seemed to remember an interview in which the First Minister had revealed a possible reason for her extreme antipathy to the idea – one for the BBC’s extensive and rather good three-part documentary “Yes/No – Inside The Indyref”, which was broadcast in August 2019 and never seen again.

It’s not available on iPlayer or YouTube, but fortunately we happened to still have the show recorded on our Sky+ box, so we went to check, and lo and behold our source’s recollection was correct. Apologies for the slightly wonky quality of this video, as we had to record it off the TV screen.

We’ve transcribed it below.

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