Wings Over Scotland

We’ve had another Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government.

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We’ve just received the most extraordinary Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government, readers. Trust us, you want to go and make yourselves a strong cup of tea before you read it. Or get this guy to bring you one.

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Following up this morning’s article, we’ve been trawling through the Publications/FOI section of the Scottish Government website to see which other articles might be being hidden from its search function. We found quite a few, and you’re never going to guess what the common factor in all of them is.

We’ve given you a wee clue with that picture, though.

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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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Our regular weekend comedian Chris Cairns is off on a golf holiday this weekend (in fairness he’s only had four so far this year and it’s already August), but this is a sicker joke than anything he’s ever come up with.

We haven’t covered Martin Keating’s court case because we have some unanswered concerns about its transparency and communication, but it’s doing just fine without us, having passed £100,000 of its £155,000 funding target earlier today.

It’s bad enough that some random activist is having to do this and pay for it when the Scottish Government – who SHOULD have been doing it three years ago – sits with its thumb up its hole staring out of the window, but having their representatives actively attack and try to sabotage it is disgusting to a degree we can barely find words for.

We’ve had our fair share of doubts about stuff of late, but if Scottish independence achieved nothing more than putting a useless wage-stealing tosser like Pete Wishart out of a cushy Westminster job-for-life, it’d be worth doing for that alone.

This post was written by an SNP NEC member present at last week’s controversial Zoom meeting, who wishes to remain anonymous. Wings has verified their credentials.

A farce, a shambles, an incompetent mess. There’s no other way to sum up the NEC stitch-up of the Edinburgh Central seat last week.

Bad enough was the situation of the Glasgow Cathcart seat, over which my sources tell me it didn’t take long for someone in ministerial tower to realise “but what if Dornan jumps ship to an Indy list party, we’ve just given them a seat in Parliament to promote why our both votes SNP message doesn’t make sense.”

And of course those looking at what really matters in the near future were noting “we could already be relying on Derek Mackay to turn back up at Parliament – and for Mark McDonald to crawl out from the bus we threw him under – to survive a confidence vote if the inquiry doesn’t go our way, now we’ve just lost Dornan’s vote, the Greens are going to hold us to ransom…” 

Fast forward a mere day and James Dornan didn’t even need to threaten legal action to get that decision overturned.

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The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:

So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:

That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.

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Alert readers will probably have noticed that earlier today we featured a post by SNP MP Kenny MacAskill making the seemingly-unsurprising statement that the purpose of his party is to “bring about the end of the British state”.

So we thought he might have wanted to check with his colleague Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokeman and an obsessive Russophobe, when we saw a snide quote from him in a Belfast Telegraph story disparaging former leader Alex Salmond (who’d advocated the reunification of Ireland during a chat with ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern) for the heinous crime of “proposing the disruption of the United Kingdom”.

It later transpired that there’d been an error and the quote should have been (and now is) attributed to a Scottish Conservatives spokesman.

But we couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of shock with which the comment was received on social media in the several hours between its publication and correction, as if nobody thought it at all implausible that McDonald would have said such a thing. (And indeed, it’s barely different from what he HAS said about Salmond’s RT show.) There were plenty harsh criticisms of him, but we didn’t see a single tweet suggesting that a mistake might have been made.

Never more so than in 2020, sometimes fiction is more believable than truth.

I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet, here we are.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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Just an SNP activist tonight, saying that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament or not, and that it’s undemocratic for a new pro-indy party to stand democratically for election like any other and take seats from Unionists (as long as the SNP hold power in the devolved administration, of course).

Other SNP activists, meanwhile, are already openly trying to dig dirt and undermine the women leading the new party, which is only planning to contest list seats and therefore poses no threat to the SNP whatsoever. Does anyone still think the current SNP care about independence, rather than power?

Scotland’s media is still unable to contain its outpouring of bitter, resentful rage over Alex Salmond’s exoneration by a jury on trumped-up sexual assault charges.

Flailing blindly in all directions it’s achieving little other than to embarrass itself, such as last night when Scotland On Sunday had to change its front page in a late panic. But the media’s toxic fury at being denied Salmond’s head on a pole has also led it to do something far, far more serious and reckless.

And every one of them knows exactly what they’ve done.

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