Wings Over Scotland

You could actually weep for some of the people in our country.

But the point Yes supporters understand and Unionists don’t is that it’s everything to do with the question – because “who is or might be Prime Minister, or which party is in government” is never our choice. It’s the choice of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland together. One of those countries outnumbers the others by 8 to 1.

More than that, it isn’t just who is Prime Minister now, or who may be in the future – it’s every single Prime Minister in my 35 years of existence on this planet.

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The modern world is an ideological minefield, readers, and is increasingly almost as dangerous as a real one. Having the wrong opinions about things can easily get you fired, ostracised from polite society, arrested or beaten up, and nowhere is this more the case than in the sphere of gender politics.

The extremely brave intersex woman Claire Graham (aka @MRKHvoice on Twitter, her latest account after a series of arbitrary bannings for upsetting the wrong people with statements of biological fact) recently compiled a list of things which are now deemed “transphobic” by trans activists, and given the transience and vulnerability of anything published on Twitter, we thought it was a good idea to preserve it here, with some additions of our own and from others.

[EDIT 9 Dec 2019: Claire has of course now been permanently banned and her original list deleted by Twitter.]

We’ve previously noted how alarmingly this sort of extremist, intolerant and openly violent male bullying in the guise of progressive political correctness has been used in recent months to silence all sorts of people (mainly but not exclusively feminists).

Politicians, police and numerous other authorities in both Scotland and the UK have been complicit – whether intentionally or not – in enabling a terrifying “woke” culture of censorship and intimidation in which the wishes of the vast majority of the public are about to be simply ridden roughshod over, resulting in the creation of laws which could have (and are already having) absolutely horrific consequences.

Anyone raising issues, however, is liable to find themselves at the centre of a vicious storm of outrage, abuse or worse. So if you’re concerned about the imminent abolition of sex but want to stay out of trouble, here’s the stuff you need to avoid.

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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Alert readers may have noticed that for a non-holiday period, Scottish politics is a deathly quiet place at the moment. Papers are struggling to find anything to write about at all, and were beside themselves with joy this week when presented with the chance to fabricate a ridiculous “anti-Semitism” story about an obscure blogger criticising a trade union and fill several pages with hysterical fauxtrage over it.

The sheer dearth of anything happening whatsoever is typified by the Scottish Daily Mail’s front-page splash this morning.

It sounds dramatic – a potentially catastrophic en-masse exodus of Scotland’s doctors would certainly be a crisis. But anyone reading beyond the lurid headline will swiftly discover a rather less doom-laden reality.

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And we do mean rank. It’s been quite a week already for super-hapless Labour MP Hugh Gaffney, but he excelled himself today when joining in with Scottish Labour’s campaign to resist building a new hospital in Gartcosh (which is the recommendation of an independent NHS panel), rather than on the site of the current one in Monklands.

(And yes, that is the same one Labour wanted to shut down in 2007.)

Because it wasn’t terribly long ago that he took a rather different view.

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There’s not much going on in Scottish politics at the moment, but you know that when the media resorts to printing stuff from echo-skulled Tory mousewit Annie Wells, there can’t even have been any barrel left to scrape.

Grimly, the spelling in the headline is the LEAST embarrassing facet of the story.

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Kenny McBride is a Wings reader. This is his personal experience and view. 

A couple of weeks ago Ian Small, BBC Scotland’s Head of Public Policy, wrote an article for the Scotsman addressing the question of anti-independence bias at Pacific Quay. Naturally he defended the Corporation strongly, but he also made what seemed like an invitation:

“The issue over BBC content being posted online brought a further consequence, with over 200 people turning up at Pacific Quay in Glasgow last week to demonstrate against BBC bias. We offered to talk. That offer still stands. We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-making.”

I was sceptical, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I decided to act.

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This year’s Scottish Household Survey is out, and the press is in an absolutely gleeful orgy of misery over it. Here’s the Times, for example:

The paper’s leading line is that “only half of those polled were happy with schools, the NHS and transport provision in their area”. So readers would naturally assume that the other half were DISsatisfied, right?

The reality is somewhat different.

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Perhaps the single most striking feature of everyday non-constitutional Scottish politics is Labour’s constantly-recurring habit of highlighting some supposedly unsatisfactory statistic about the Scottish Government’s performance, only for it to be revealed that it’s vastly better than the comparable figure for Wales, where Labour has been in power ever since the Assembly was created in 1999.

So let’s crank up the machine again and see what it says, shall we?

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While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

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The Scottish media has really had to scrape the barrel to give a negative spin to some NHS stats today. The Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Record and Scotsman all feature a story concerning an increase in ambulance waiting times, noting that the number of callouts taking more than ten minutes has doubled in four years.

What they’re a lot more reluctant to reveal is that the reason for that is a deliberate policy change which has meant ambulances have been saving more people’s lives.

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The recent former Daily Record editor and even more recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with a rather audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.

But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.

We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.

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