Wings Over Scotland

Senator Claire Chandler is a Liberal Party member of the Australian Parliament. Some recent experiences she’s had send a very serious warning about the likely outcomes of the Scottish Government’s wildly unpopular new Hate Crime Bill. She’s graciously allowed us to publish this column she wrote on the subject.

Early this month I received a letter from Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner directing me to attend a compulsory “conciliation” conference with somebody offended by my comments about the need to protect women’s sport and women’s toilets and changerooms. You can watch them here:

Ironically, the complaint against me was about an opinion article I wrote about free speech. You can read it here and make up your own mind whether bureaucrats at the Anti-Discrimination Commission should be able to censor any Australian citizens for this kind of public policy discussion.

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The BBC ran a completely insane story this week about a transman (ie a mentally ill woman) who almost died of kidney failure because she didn’t tell her doctors what sex she really was. The standout paragraph was probably the one pictured below, in which the atom-brained narcissist imbecile explained to a startled nation that apparently having a mental disorder also changes your physical biology:

(Also, y’know, “cute and awesome!” is definitely how men talk.)

But anyway. When we commission opinion polls, we’ve often noted that in any given poll you can expect around 5-10% of respondents to vote for even the most seemingly ridiculous options – either as a “joke”, or because they’re too dim to have understood the question, or whatever.

And last week we thought we’d put that to the test.

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This week saw publication of the long-awaited Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report on alleged Russian interference in British affairs. Despite media hysteria, the report contained no new revelations, just all-too-familiar catastrophising about Moscow’s ill-defined “disinformation” efforts and warnings of the undue influence rich Russians (most of whom are actually Kremlin opponents) have bought themselves.

The most salient point for supporters of Scottish independence to consider was the allegation that Moscow’s interference efforts extended to the 2014 indyref. As Wings pointed out earlier this week, however, the “evidence” to support this sensational claim amounted to nothing more than a heavily-redacted single paragraph, citing “credible open source commentary” as its sole source.

A look at the paragraph’s accompanying footnote reveals the “credible open source” commentator was Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council. For those in the fortunate position of being unfamiliar with his work, Nimmo is known for, among other things, falsely identifying a Syrian-Australian blogger and a British pensioner as Russian bots – so clearly someone whose expertise should be relied upon to determine the extent of Russian infiltration into Scottish politics.

I mention this not simply to reveal the transparently amateurish nature of the ISC’s report but rather to offer a commentary on the SNP’s (predictably) disappointing response to its allegations.

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The rapid regression of civilisation continues apace, readers.

Because it ought to be noted that it’s not the concept of homosexuality that’s being deemed offensive there, nor the word itself, but specifically the definition of it.

In other words, a dictionary just said “some people are offended by facts”.

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Holiday Boy is on holiday again. But this week we stumbled across a genuine piece of artwork that might explain a lot about the way Unionists think.

Happy Someone Else’s Independence Day, readers.

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Alert readers may have noticed that this site is once more under attack from Twitter. Following the suspension of the main Wings account last December, and one we set up for the prospective political party – suspensions which Twitter has never justified, because the Wings account did not break any of its rules – it has now suspended my personal account (@RevStu) and the account of old spinoff site The Sealand Gazette, both supposedly for evading the ban on the @WingsScotland account.

This allegation is clearly a nonsense, because the RevStu account predated the Wings one by years and was in constant use from its creation up until this morning, and the Gazette account was only used briefly as an emergency backup for the RevStu one when it was temporarily locked at the weekend for unspecified “suspicious activity”, which is a technical security issue rather than a suspension for supposed wrongdoing.

The actual reason for the suspension of all four accounts is this site’s opposition to controversial and massively unpopular transgender ideology, which Twitter supports and which is currently the subject of some hotly-contested and important lawmaking.

(It’s the same reason why Twitter has banned scores, probably hundreds of feminists for the most absurdly innocuous of tweets perceived as challenging trans ideology.)

In other words, these actions are direct censorship and deliberate interference in the political affairs of a country by an unaccountable and unelected foreign corporation serving the interests of a massive right-wing pharmacological lobby.

And even people who despise Wings Over Scotland should be alarmed by that.

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These are the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe-left grouping in the USA with around 60,000 members (or roughly 10 times as many as the Scottish Greens, though per capita closer to the SSP or RISE), at their conference a couple of days ago.

It’s our most fervent wish that one day the left will grasp the fact that this isn’t how you win a war.

It’s also our most abiding fear that this – with its stern admonitions against clapping, or banner-waving, or speaking to anyone who might disagree with you, or taking “fun shortcuts” or wearing “aggressive scents”, in case any of those things cause trauma to the sensitive – might as well be the SNP conference of 2022.

Let’s not blow independence in this Parliament, eh folks?