{"id":141930,"date":"2024-03-25T09:08:28","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T09:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/?p=141930"},"modified":"2024-03-25T09:23:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T09:23:21","slug":"into-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/into-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"Into Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland.<\/p>\n

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We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now<\/a>. But until this month, we hadn’t felt directly under threat by it. Wings is – sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone – based in Bath, in England, and we couldn’t see how the Scottish police could come after us.<\/p>\n

And then we read this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We initially thought Craig must have got it wrong.<\/p>\n

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But then lawyer after lawyer queued up to support his interpretation, and we became alarmed. Along with JK Rowling<\/a>, For Women Scotland<\/a> and Murray Blackburn Mackenzie<\/a>, it’s hard to think of anyone the transgender cult would rather bring down than Wings Over Scotland, and the Hate Crime Act puts that goal firmly in reach.<\/p>\n

They would not have to achieve any sort of criminal conviction to do so. The point of the law, with its basically non-existent threshold for “hate”, is to terrorise those with views that are unpalatable to the Scottish Government out of voicing their opinions at all, via a method often called “process as punishment”<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wings has already experienced the technique<\/a>. In 2017, under a very similar law, I was subjected to a malicious, ridiculous allegation of “harassment” by a journalist whose work we’d critiqued, and arrested. I was dragged off to a police station, thrown in a cell, detained for 15 hours, and then released just before midnight, 10 miles from home in a remote and unfamiliar location with no money and no mobile phone, and told to make my own way back.<\/p>\n

I had no phone because all of my phones, along with all my tablets, all my laptops and all my desktop PCs, had been seized – for no justifiable reason, because all of the supposed “harassment” took place online, and tweets aren’t stored on your devices but on Twitter’s servers – when I was arrested and then taken away and impounded by the Metropolitan Police (because the complainer was based in London).<\/p>\n

Even bags of badges and promo items were taken. I kept one as a souvenir.<\/p>\n

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I then spent three months on bail waiting to find out whether I’d be charged. To continue producing Wings in the meantime I had to spend several thousand pounds to replace all the computer equipment that was sitting in a police locker. When the matter was dropped the police refused to return it, demanding that I instead made a six-hour round trip to London to retrieve it myself, although the items were far too numerous and heavy to carry on a train.<\/p>\n

(And obviously the hefty cost of all the replacements was non-recoverable. In all sorts of ways, there’s almost no justice available in the UK to victims of false accusations.)<\/p>\n

I’m made of reasonably strong stuff – imagine being able to do this job for the last 12 and a half years otherwise – but readers can probably imagine what an unpleasant experience that all was, even though I wasn’t even charged<\/em> with a crime, let alone convicted of one. And the purpose of the Hate Crime Act is to menace dissident voices with the prospect of being put through that more or less constantly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because no sooner would we have replaced one set of confiscated gear than another barrage of complaints would arrive from transactivists, another arrest and confiscation would follow, and the cycle would repeat until we either closed the site down or were swiftly bankrupt.<\/p>\n

The principle is similar (in both method and its intended target) to that of the infamous 1913 Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act<\/a>, commonly referred to as the “Cat And Mouse Act”, which was deployed against the Suffragettes.<\/p>\n

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The object was to put women under relentless stress and keep them perpetually cycling in and out of prison in order to break their resistance. But in this case the heroic strength shown by the Suffragettes is not enough by itself to overcome the tactic, because neither we nor FWS nor MBM or any of Scotland’s other gender-critical voices have access to an infinite supply of money to keep buying new electronics.<\/p>\n

(JK Rowling probably does, but the police aren’t going to be stupid enough to arrest her in a million years. Foul-mouthed oiks like Wings and working-class women like FWS are much easier targets, as we’ve already seen in the ludicrous cases of women like Jennifer Swayne<\/a> and Marion Millar<\/a>, arrested and dragged to court<\/a> for stickers<\/a> and ribbons<\/a>. FWS have also been warned by Police Scotland that the phrase “Women Won’t Wheesht” might constitute a hate crime<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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Such arrests prove that the “reasonable person” test in the law offers no real protection for anyone targeted by the rainbow stormtroopers of the SNP and Scottish Greens’ Twitler Youth. No reasonable person could ever have considered Miller or Swayne guilty of any sort of crime, but they were still put through the torment and expense for months. The process was the punishment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nor is there even any reliable hope that you WON’T actually be convicted. It’s under two years since indy activist Dave Llewellyn was convicted of a crime for sarcastically quoting George Galloway’s comments back at him<\/a>, something that the controversial firebrand MP apparently found so terrifying that the police had to be called.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We can’t help feeling that Galloway may swiftly find himself the recipient of some karma under this law, and no, that isn’t a threat. It’s not too hard to find comments from the member for Rochdale that could be construed as “stirring up hatred”<\/em> of Israel, say, and supporters on both sides of the Gaza situation are famously level-headed, fair-minded and moderate.<\/p>\n

And politicians aren’t immune. Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, who opposed the Act in a fine illustration of the “stopped clock” principle, revealed at the weekend that he now has a “Non-Crime Hate Incident” recorded against his name<\/a> for saying “Choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Neither Galloway nor Fraser, of course, are people indy supporters will have much in the way of instinctive sympathy for, but Mark Hirst and Dave Llewellyn should be, and in any event it all just confirms the eternal wisdom of Pastor Martin Niemoller, inmate of Dachau concentration camp.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are no “reasonable people” in Scotland any more<\/a> – or at least, if there are they aren’t in charge of anything.<\/p>\n

Wings, therefore, after a few brief chats with lawyers, finds itself forced to seriously consider its position, and that means taking proper advice. We have commissioned, and await, a formal legal opinion from a very senior Scottish KC with expertise in the field about whether it’s safe for the site and its social media accounts to continue to exist, either in their current forms or some kind of censored ones.<\/p>\n

(If you’ve ever considered following us on Twitter<\/a> but not got round to it, we strongly advise you to do so before 1 April, as it may be considerably harder afterwards.)<\/p>\n

We’ve put up a small fundraiser<\/a> to hopefully cover the costs of the advice, with some gorgeous Hate Monster enamel badges to tempt people into donating. Click the pic below (or the one at the top of this article) to visit it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We aim, and fervently hope, to still be here after April Yousaf’s Day. But we also hope readers will understand that in the grotesque, intolerant, dystopian Scotland now being created by the SNP, we need to be sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland. We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now. But until this month, we hadn’t felt directly under threat by it. Wings is – sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone – based […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,11,38,6,5,279],"tags":[215],"class_list":["post-141930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-disturbing","category-navel-gazing","category-scotpol","category-stupidity","category-transcult","tag-fundraisers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Ywtu-AVc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141930"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141975,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141930\/revisions\/141975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wingsoverscotland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}