The following article by Conor Matchett appears in today’s Scotsman:
It’s a pretty standard anti-Wings smear piece, except for this bit:
which is simply a flat-out lie. We can’t speak for Kenny MacAskill, but we do know for sure that Wings has NOT been contacted for comment by Mr Matchett.
We’d happily have provided a quote if we HAD been asked, to give the lazy hatchet job (perhaps “Matchett job”) at least a minimal veneer of balance and fairness as a boost to the badly-ailing paper’s “trusted, fact-checked journalism”. Since we’re banned from Twitter, perhaps someone could pass that on to Mr Matchett.
In the meantime, Wings readers should look forward to some more posts from SNP politicians, which we’ll be publishing later today.
It would be improper not to note that in addition to this:
…Darren McGarvey has contacted me directly by email this evening with what I take to be a sincere apology, which I’ve accepted as such.
(It was a private communication and won’t be reproduced here.)
I have no problem at all with people disliking me and saying so – I’m hardly a shrinking violet – but I can’t abide hypocrisy, which is what the massive pile-on from friends of Neil Mackay yesterday amounted to, and while I couldn’t give the slightest toss about the opinions of the people involved, even one person doing the decent thing over what was said deserves to be acknowledged. While I’m sure that we’ll continue to disagree profoundly and strongly on many or most things, what’s right is right.
It contains nothing that those who listened in on the case by telephone last week didn’t hear for themselves – it’s simply an 11-page summary of what was debated in court and casts no new light on what Lady Dorrian said at the time.
We’ll be very interested to see whether or not The Spectator – or perhaps more to the point its lawyers, who we must presume had vetted and cleared the initial publication just as Alex Salmond’s lawyers had – now feels able to restore the redacted paragraph that it removed after what it can now be publicly revealed was a threat from the Crown Office (a threat also received by this website).
The magazine’s response today is non-committal on the subject.
While it is this site’s belief that the paragraph in question DOES NOT identify anyone as a complainer – the Crown Office has not communicated which “other evidence” it feels could be combined with the paragraph, which makes no reference whatsoever to the criminal case, to provide identification – the restoration of the missing paragraph would certainly appear to provide circumstantial evidence to that effect, something which would be entirely due to the intervention of the Crown Office.
But overall, the needless delay in publishing this document has merely run down the clock on the inquiry by another week – time that it can ill afford – without providing any real additional clarity.
(We’re a bit puzzled as to why The Spectator’s counsel appears to have given up so easily on the second element of their application, which sought to specifically permit the publication of both Salmond and Geoff Aberdein’s written evidence.)
The fact that the judgement wasn’t released yesterday probably means, at a minimum, no more evidence sessions until next week, as the committee generally only meets on Tuesdays. We hope that doesn’t become a crucial issue, but we fear that the written judgement is sufficiently tepid that the crooked SNP members of the committee, and the spineless Andy Wightman, will use it to justify rejecting Salmond’s evidence and therefore hearing from him in person, rendering the entire undertaking moot anyway.
The SNP have plumbed some real depths recently, but this is a new low.
Although we suppose on one level you could spin it as a positive, namely that disabled people really are just like everyone else – they can be despicable scumbags too.
I started writing this post two weeks ago, incensed at the behaviour of the SNP NEC and their proposals to introduce self-ID for disability. Then they sacked Joanna Cherry from the front bench.
Joanna Cherry is probably one of the few people left in the SNP exec that even knows what Chesterton’s Fence is, and its importance in lawmaking. As a gay woman, she understands on a practical level the issues round equality legislation.
It also means that she’s a particular target for certain groups. Ye shall know a genius by this sign; all the dunces of the world are in confederacy against her.
Two weeks ago a Wings scoop caused quite a furore to erupt around the SNP’s ham-fisted and corruptly-motivated attempts to increase BAME and disabled representation at this year’s Holyrood election.
We’ve always been opposed to what were until recently known as “quotas”, and prior to that “positive discrimination”, but have now been cunningly rebranded as “diversity and inclusion” because that’s a much more difficult thing to say you object to.
It’s easy to make an honourable-sounding case against any form of “discrimination”, because decent and civilised people are taught to automatically think of discrimination as a bad thing, even if you put “positive” in front of it.
So the word “quotas” was adopted to move the concept from a pejorative term to a neutral noun – objecting to “quotas” doesn’t sound intolerant, any more than objecting to (say) “procedures” does. So that’s fine, because you can still discuss it like adults without too much unpleasantness.
But those pushing the agenda got smarter still by changing the name again. If you say you object to “diversity and inclusion”, you sound like a monster and a racist, because diversity and inclusion are plainly good things – no decent person wants to live in a monoculture, or to exclude anybody from society – and so the debate is immediately drowned out by self-righteous tossers screaming “BIGOT!” and “NAZI!” at everyone.
And yet in the context of social policy the three phrases mean the exact same thing. They’re all systems for overriding raw democracy so as to increase the representation of selected groups at the expense of other groups, for one reason or another.
(Sometimes it’s ostensibly just penance for historical wrongs, while at other times it’s supposedly for economic benefits, and so on.)
And while the proponents of those systems will openly argue that the only group being disadvantaged is straight white men so it’s all fine (because nobody likes straight white men and anyone standing up for them can be easily dismissed as a “gammon” for lots of woke points and Twitter likes), it isn’t even remotely close to the truth.
Because in “diversity and inclusion”, some groups are a lot more included than others.
The two main centres of infection for the woke entryist poison currently disfiguring the SNP are Stirling and Aberdeen, where they coalesce around two Westminster MPs – Twitler Youth gauleiter Alyn Smith and the worryingly unhinged Kirsty Blackman.
In recent months Wings has documented numerous attempts by the faction (which is chiefly characterised by its hyper-extremist and fundamentalist version of transgender ideology) to gerrymander and fix the party’s internal election processes to ensure that its disciples – who are enormously unpopular among the grassroots membership and have repeatedly failed to win by playing fair – get selected as candidates.
100%Yes on The Valley Of The Dolls: “Trying to fit a square into a circle is never going to work. I’m afraid the SNP and the Greens…” Dec 9, 18:07
Iain More on The Valley Of The Dolls: “It is a toxic world for any white heterosexual males and females.” Dec 9, 18:04
Vronsky on The Valley Of The Dolls: “It’s too easy to point out the madness, we need to understand that to your average politician this apparent silliness…” Dec 9, 17:57
panda paws on The Valley Of The Dolls: “Indeed it isn’t. It is illegal for someone who in an official capacity knows another person has a GRC to…” Dec 9, 17:44
Colin Dawson on The Valley Of The Dolls: “Given the avalanche of litigation that is likely to result from the Scottish Government’s allegedly unlawful gender self-ID policies over…” Dec 9, 17:40
Jill on The Valley Of The Dolls: “English women here who follows you for your reporting on this issue. A huge thank you again for your time…” Dec 9, 17:25
Rev. Stuart Campbell on The Valley Of The Dolls: “Remain in your home. Officers will be with you shortly.” Dec 9, 17:24
agentx on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““A salutary lesson for us all when sidling up to strange men in a working man’s public house…” ————————————- That’s…” Dec 9, 17:24
duncanio on The Valley Of The Dolls: “In most areas of employment where judgments so overwhelmingly incompetent and negligent as were made by this tribunal the person…” Dec 9, 17:20
Morgatron on The Valley Of The Dolls: “I started reading the bollocks last night and my head was whirling. If that is the judiciary now , there…” Dec 9, 17:07
Frank Gillougley on The Valley Of The Dolls: “A three hundred page tome that collapses under its own weight, and this is seriously held up to shed light…” Dec 9, 16:59
Kenny on The Valley Of The Dolls: “It is NOT unlawful to ask someone if they have a GRC. I don’t know why the Supreme Court made…” Dec 9, 16:33
SilentMajority on The Valley Of The Dolls: “…outstanding work! I really hope that someone shows that Employment Tribunal judge this post…now that so much of his chaotic…” Dec 9, 16:17
Anne on The Valley Of The Dolls: “There was a young man in the ladies loo at Edinburgh Botanical gardens yesterday .He hadn’t even bothered to put…” Dec 9, 16:12
Effijy on The Valley Of The Dolls: “The ruling shows a complete contradiction to the high court ruling. If this trans doctor has male genitalia then he…” Dec 9, 16:02
Paul Garbett on The Valley Of The Dolls: “I don’t say this often enough Stu but a big thank you for this forensic analysis of what is a…” Dec 9, 16:01
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: “I had a similar experience when reading my hard(cover) version of “Fashionable Frocks for Clydeside Welders” in Tennents a few…” Dec 9, 15:51
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: “It might not be true, but I heard somewhere, somewhen, that Salmond pissed pure alcohol… so he might very well…” Dec 9, 15:03
Mark Beggan on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Funny you should say that. I nearly caused a riot when I started reading my copy of, ‘Homosexually in modern…” Dec 9, 15:01
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: “(please note: Any text capitalized and italicized and spelled in American-English and surrounded by single quotation marks in any of…” Dec 9, 15:00
Mark Beggan on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Typical pleb with hands out begging for your tax back.” Dec 9, 14:49
Northcode on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““…while my modified version would work in the real world…” It might well work in some other ‘real’ world… just…” Dec 9, 14:39
James on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Alex wouldnae piss on the likes of you if you were on fire.” Dec 9, 14:23
sarah on Off-topic: “Hi Marie and Tinto, I’m sitting in the car after 2 teeth extractions whilst MOH has one done so I…” Dec 9, 14:20
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Long Walk To Freedom: “Written by Anonymous: ———————- Much ado about Alex: I was standing at the bar of the Kilcreggan Hotel, alone, on…” Dec 9, 13:49
Alf Baird on The Long Walk To Freedom: “The important point in liberating any colonized people is that elected national representatives no longer hold allegiance or take an…” Dec 9, 13:45
Hatey McHateface on The Long Walk To Freedom: ““The Scottish people can, if they so wish at any Scottish election, vote for a party or parties who wish…” Dec 9, 13:05
Tinto Chiel on Off-topic: “Amen to all that, Marie. We live in difficult times, which Globalist Milliband would probably make even worse. Glad you…” Dec 9, 13:03