These two Sunday front pages three weeks apart sounded awfully similar.
But it turned out to be a lot worse than we thought.
When we get bored in the summer silly season, we often start poking around in stats. This week we’d been pondering the complete waste of everyone’s time Anas Sarwar’s four and a half years in charge of Scottish Labour have been, and the open goal he’s missed in failing to capitalise on a period of constant chaos and turmoil for the SNP.
That got us to thinking about which leaders in the Scottish Parliament era have made a significant difference (in either direction) to the fortunes of their parties, and from there it was pretty short work to illustrate it in the form of a graph.
It rather leaps out at you, doesn’t it?
There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.
“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.
At some point, we’re all going to have to have a discussion about the word “normal”.
Because suffering from a debilitating mental illness that supposedly causes you to commit suicide if medical professionals don’t pump you full of wrong-sex hormones and/or mutilate or remove healthy and functioning parts of your body, and which affects no more than 1 in 300 people, is NOT, in fact, “completely normal”. Nor is having a physical disorder affecting less than 1 in 5,000 people. They’re the exact opposite of that. They’re extremely abnormal.
(“Abnormal” is not an intrinsically pejorative term, it’s a simple neutral statement of fact, meaning something that’s uncommon or unusual.)
But that’s not the main problem with NHS Fife’s “LGBTQI+” website.
For the combatants in the gender wars, it’s been quite a spring and summer here in the TERF Island theatre of battle.
In February, polling company YouGov revealed the vast extent to which public opinion has shifted around the issue (significantly though not entirely in the wake of the Cass Review last April), which we reported on via a snazzy Stalingrad metaphor. But just as with Stalingrad, it was only the precursor to the recapture of territory on an epic scale.
So let’s recap what we’ve won and what it means.
You might think you’ve heard this tired old song before.
But wait! This one’s streamlined! Come back!
We’ve said it for a lot of years, but “1984” really does contain a complete explanation of every aspect of modern life, and especially politics.
So let’s look at today’s Herald On Sunday, and in particular its “special report”.
It seems like almost every time somebody gets accused of rape, sexual harassment or any kind of horrible creepy sex-based sleaze in Scotland these days, the same face is always lurking around grinning in the background somewhere.
Can you guess who it is yet?
So this snuck out quietly at the bottom of page 2 of today’s Daily Record.
And like, we suspect, most of Scotland, our response was “WHAT?”
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
