The Gauntlet 149
Well, this has set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Because the SNP leadership election is now a full-blown four-alarm skip fire.
Well, this has set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Because the SNP leadership election is now a full-blown four-alarm skip fire.
The charity LGBT Youth Scotland is currently the subject of a live police investigation over its involvement in a second major child-abuse scandal in little over a decade.
So you’d expect Police Scotland to be taking that pretty seriously, right?
BBC NEWS: [abysmal, unprofessional disgrace to broadcasting]
ITV NEWS: Hold our beer!
(Still not deleted/fixed seven hours later.)
Wings Over Scotland has been monitoring the BBC’s coverage of Scottish politics for over 11 years now, readers, and other than The Nick Robinson Incident we’re honestly struggling to remember seeing anything worse than this.
The Corporation’s “coverage” of Ash Regan’s campaign launch for the SNP leadership election ran for roughly seven minutes. And we suppose we should be grateful that it did at one point feature a brief, incidental cameo appearance from Ash Regan.
This is beyond insane.
Like, obviously Rangers aren’t better than Celtic.
Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:
Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.
Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.
On January 22nd the violent, abusive transgender activist Jack Douglas, who now uses the name Beth and the Twitter username “pickle_bee” (slang for “somebody who likes dick”), threatened that feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s imminent “Standing For Women” event in Glasgow was going to be disrupted by the “furry” community, who happen to be hosting a gathering at the Crowne Plaza that same weekend.
The intimidatory protest was also publicised by SNP MSP Christina McKelvie, who led the standing ovation the Scottish Parliament gave Beth and his creepy friends the day it passed the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
“Why? What possible grudge could furries have against women?”, a friend giggled, as I related this news to her. But to answer that we have to know who these people are.
It’s been a rough old week for the First Minister.
And next week’s not looking much better.
This is incredible.
We couldn’t put it better than Alba MP Neale Hanvey, who said:
The SNP are a flailing shambles of incompetence, under a leader fast losing her iron grip on her own party as they watch her turning it into a laughing stock with growing horror. More and more disquiet reaches our ears from within her increasingly leaky and nervous Parliamentary groups. Who will be the first to tie their courage to a flagpole and make the move to mutiny? We can only wait and see.
Last night we couldn’t help chuckling at this.
Because as someone else on Twitter mocked, what’s actually laughable is the idea that criminals would never engage in any kind of deception in order to commit crimes, and that someone like Peter Tatchell would be so idiotic as to suggest such a thing.
But tonight it’s not even blackly comic.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)