Wings Over Scotland

We’ve had plenty to say already this week about the amendment that will be debated at Holyrood this afternoon. So instead we’re going to present you today with the case for each side, as made by two Scottish women on Twitter in the last few hours, and let you decide for yourselves whose argument is the more compelling.

First up, in favour of the amendment, is Scotsman writer Gina Davidson.

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The Scottish Parliament website has just published a letter from Peter Murrell following his appearance at the Salmond inquiry yesterday.

The media is focusing on Murrell’s continued evasion of the question of his WhatsApp usage (Murrell bizarrely states he has several messaging apps installed on his phone but uses none of them), but there’s a much more interesting revelation in the second of the letter’s two sections.

This is a direct, unambiguous and categorical statement from the First Minister that the investigation into the false allegations against Salmond was a Scottish Government matter that was absolutely nothing to do with the SNP.

Her failure to record the use of her private office at the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issue on 29 March 2018 (despite repeated denials that such a thing happened at all), and to take minutes of that discussion and of subsequent meetings at her home to consider the issue, and her numerous statements that the matter was private party business (now revealed by Murrell to be false) are all therefore indisputably breaches of the Ministerial Code.

The net draws ever tighter.

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This site and other gender-critical voices are regularly accused of being “obsessed” with trans issues, even though the subject has been mentioned in fewer than 0.7% of Wings posts. But this week the SNP’s transgender faction – when it hasn’t been STILL raging about its battering in the NEC elections – has been swamping social media with organised complaints about a tiny prospective legislative change that they themselves insist doesn’t actually matter at all.

But wait a minute – that’s not true, is it?

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For anyone hoping for an outbreak of sanity and decency, this is a bad sign.

Rape Crisis Scotland, who are almost entirely dependent on the Scottish Government for funding, have chosen this evening to wade into the debate over the wording of a new law which is intended to lessen the trauma of people (nearly all women) who’ve been raped. We can only speculate as to whether they were pressured to do so, but the intervention seems likely only to pour petrol on the fire.

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Well, we need to qualify that quite a lot.

In his evidence to a Holyrood inquiry today, having been asked about some troubling WhatsApp messages concerning the case from 2018 which appeared to suggest the possibility of a conspiracy against the former First Minister, Murrell told members of the committee “I’m not on WhatsApp, it’s not a social media platform I use”.

Alert readers will have noticed a very careful use of the present tense there.

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We’ve now filed a formal complaint with the Scottish Information Commissioner about this, because what we’d forgotten last week was that our original request was actually sent in September and it’s now been almost 60 working days with no sign of a proper response, not the 20 it’s supposed to take.

Because for some reason the Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t want you to know what the First Minister and Geoff Aberdein talked about in March 2018, and we think that you probably should.

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We don’t normally like to devote much time on Wings to things that have been more than adequately covered elsewhere in the media, which is why you haven’t read much here about eg the Internal Market Bill. Unlike some we don’t see much point spending our limited human resources telling people stuff they already know and agree with.

But we’re going to make an exception for this next thing, which was already covered pretty well by Susan Dalgety in last week’s Scotsman, because (a) a lot of our readers, quite reasonably, will have an instinctively adverse reaction to either anything printed in the Scotsman or anything written by Susan Dalgety, and (b) a number of people have asked us to amplify this issue because it’s so important and so awful.

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From an interview with Mike Russell in today’s Sunday National:

Just a couple of quick questions.

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These people are deranged. That is all

(Pictured: Guy Ingerson, yesterday.)

As well as the SNP NEC elections, the weekend saw the election of the first committee of a new grassroots independence organisation which is unfortunately and hopefully temporarily going by the stupendously terrible working name of “Yes Alba”.

15 people were elected to its ruling body by the votes of hundreds of delegates, with the top-ranked picks including SNP MP Angus MacNeil and former SNP MP George Kerevan. The majority of the successful candidates (eight) were female, even though there were no quotas or women-only shortlists imposed, and a wide range of ages was represented from young activists to former UK ambassador Craig Murray.

(We have no idea about any of their sexualities or gender identities, and also no interest in knowing, because those things have not the slightest bearing on their ability to fight for independence and are frankly none of our damn business.)

But that wasn’t good enough for Team Woke.

On a day when Joanna Cherry had a grown-up, reasoned and constructive column in The National calling for unity in the pursuit of independence, the outpouring of snide, sour sneering from a faction still raging with bitterness about being routed on the SNP NEC is instead curdling Twitter even as we speak.

And embarrassingly, not a single one of them has actually bothered to check even the most basic facts.

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We got this email last night.

And, y’know, that’s really not good enough, folks.

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