Wings Over Scotland

When Humza Yousaf was campaigning to be elected leader of the SNP, he pledged that he would be not only the First Minister, but also the “First Activist”. It transpired that this in fact meant chapping a few doors in Dundee, just down the road from his home in Broughty Ferry (and on the way to his Glasgow constituency).

But what might a real “First Activist” have done with the position and power?

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Wings always likes to correct any inadvertent errors as quickly as possible, so we were pleased to hear from an alert reader with a correction to this morning’s article in which we claimed that “we’re supposed to be less than six months away from a second indyref, but [Humza Yousaf] hasn’t even admitted that that isn’t happening”.

Our reader informed us that they’d actually had some communication with the Scottish Government on that matter, which we’re happy to share with you.

As far as we’re aware this fact has never been formally stated publicly before for some reason. But just in case you were still holding out hopes, now you know.

Humza Yousaf has now been the First Minister of Scotland for a month.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, as they say in Kirkcudbright.

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Last week the property-porn TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp described severely disabled people requesting same-sex care as “demonising male nurses”, although the statistics suggest that they’ve demonised themselves.

That charities have had to develop a way for severely disabled children who may have mental ages of six to eight to say “willy”, “hard” and “squirt’’ evidences the widespread nature of the sexual abuse of the vulnerable and who is most likely to do it.

Instead of trying to understand the position of disabled individuals and their families Kirstie has decided that it is best to ignore the evidence and call us man-haters.

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You really have to go some to stand out as a proper grade-A scumbag in the ranks of trans activists, readers, but let’s be fair and commend some serious effort when we see it. Everyone, meet Beth (no, not that one).

Beth is a nasty little grifter trying to monetise “transphobia”, although it’s not going massively well so far, with only five donors signed up. So they’ve come up with an idea, although not a very original one: a list.

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Oily SNP MP John Nicolson – a man who was pompous and condescending even as a teenager presenting Open To Question in the 1980s – this week posted an extended and theatrical Twitter rant at the fine Herald and National columnist Kevin McKenna.

It was quite the performance.

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Alert readers may recall our last foray into Freedom Of Information requests, when a couple of weeks ago we belatedly received a peculiarly evasive response from Police Scotland with regard to a meeting in February between the then-Chief Constable, Deputy Chief Constable and the justice secretary Keith Brown.

We duly followed it up with an FOI to the Scottish Government for Keith Brown’s official diary on that day – just about the most mundane, run-of-the-mill request possible. We expected nothing remarkable, just a short list of meetings, fully corroborating what we were told by Police Scotland.

What we got was rather more intriguing.

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Goodness knows we could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so let’s have a momentary change of tone and kick today off with a chuckle or two.

We’ve been working a bit too hard lately, and yesterday’s Wings post went to press with an unprecedented FOUR errors in it, including an “is is” instead of “it is”, a “more far” in place of a “far more” and a “strata” where there should have been a “stratum”. We’re deeply ashamed, and thanks to the alert Wings readers – including our mum – who swiftly drew our attention to them.

The most embarrassing clanger was this one, which we fixed promptly:

So imagine our surprise when we were reading this morning’s Scottish press.

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Almost every day is now a new crisis for the SNP.

But it better get used to it.

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Some years ago while working in the NHS I investigated a situation where a group of very senior staff colluded in an attempt to cover up the misdeeds of a colleague, in the full knowledge of the devastating effect their dishonesty would have.

Yet in amongst that betrayal of professional ethical values one person’s integrity could not be swayed and they spoke the candid truth. I don’t know how it affected them in the long run, but it was clear that integrity mattered to them and doing the wrong thing was a burden they were unwilling to carry.

Anyway, their courage  to hold firm to these principles impressed me and chimed with the values I believe are absolutely necessary when you are charged with responsibility over the lives of others: honesty, integrity and a strong sense of justice.

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