A response to yet more “feedback” (ahem) from Bella Caledonia

Extraordinarily, this is an attack line from a supporter of the Scottish Government’s plans to reform the GRA by legislating for gender self-ID within the next few months. Dear reader, you and I may be naive enough to believe that someone who claims to think the GRA is a less important topic than independence, Brexit, climate change and the cost of living would want to see self-ID put firmly on the backburner so we can get on with dealing with these far more pressing priorities.  But no.  Apparently the way Alec demonstrates his total disinterest in the GRA as a topic is by agitating for precious parliamentary time to be eaten up in the hope of pushing through a hugely controversial GRA reform at breakneck speed.

Answers on a postcard, folks.

Next up we have “Mr Chips” – a moniker that means nothing to me, which may not be a coincidence given that practically every single claim he makes about me and this blog is factually inaccurate…

Alternatively they could just be a figment of your imagination, old son.  The inverted commas around the words “gaming the system” are particularly bonkers given that I’ve spent half my waking life explaining why attempts to game the Holyrood electoral system are a bad idea, and given also that I stressed when I joined Alba that I hadn’t changed my view about that.  I made clear again and again that I was voting Alba on the list simply because Alba are my first choice party, and not because of any tactical wheeze.  So are you intentionally lying about my stance, Mr Chips, or are you just some clueless soul making a wild guess at what you hope I might have said?   I’ve no idea which it is, but I do know that it’s one or the other. 

That claim is plain and simply untrue.  Alba actually polled between 1% and 6% during the Holyrood campaign, and no fewer than three polls had them on 6%.  (I’m in a very good position to remember that, because I commissioned one of them myself.)  The guff about “statistical variance suggesting just noise” spectacularly misses the point, because the real question was never whether Alba were “recovering” – it was which pollster was getting it right.  If the 6% showings from Panelbase had been accurate, then Alba were on course to win multiple seats throughout the campaign.  The seats projection from the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll in April 2021 had Alba on eight seats.

Actually, what anyone with even a primary school grasp of statistics knows is that you can’t claim that Alba were polling between 1% and 4% when they in fact polled at 6% three times.  And what anyone familiar with even the basics of the English language knows is that you can’t claim that someone who thinks attempting to game the system is a bad idea was “imploring his followers that the system could be gamed”.

Crikey, he’s got something right at last – although of course even broken clocks are accurate twice a day.  Yes, Mr Chips, I’m opposed to the jailing of journalists. I believe that’s known as “being on the right side of history”.

It’s hard to know where to start with such gibberish. Presumably, again, the inverted commas are meant to indicate that I’ve portrayed myself at some point as a “women protector” – the only snag being that I’ve done no such thing.  What I certainly have said is that the Alba Party are defenders of women’s sex-based rights – a statement that is irrefutably accurate.  

To suggest that I supported Craig at his trial without understanding “the gravity of his offence” is a nonsense, because the purpose of a trial (at least in a free country, which hopefully this still is) is not to assume an offence has been committed and adjudicate upon the “gravity” of it, but instead to determine whether an offence has been committed in the first place.  Those of us who supported Craig at his trial believed – and still believe – that “not guilty” was the appropriate verdict, not least because of the total lack of evidence to substantiate the notion that anyone was actually identified in the real world due to Craig’s reporting.

Even if the erroneous verdict of “guilty” was taken at face value, though, imprisonment was plainly an inappropriate sentence for three reasons: a) it was a non-violent offence, b) there is little or no recent precedent for other journalists being jailed for similar offences, and c) Craig has health conditions which meant that a jail term needlessly put his life at genuine risk.  One of the ugliest parts of this saga was a tweet from a senior person in the SNP demanding that Craig be jailed, on the grounds that if he was sentenced to community service he would supposedly use his health conditions to worm his way out of it.  The implication being that the health conditions were somehow bogus, in spite of the testimony from his doctors.  It’s amazing how the mask of progressivism slips, isn’t it?  That’s the kind of inhuman rhetoric you’d expect to hear from the hard right “hang ’em, flog ’em” wing of the Tory party.

And because “Mr Chips” supports the jailing of journalists, and doesn’t give a damn about whether a medically vulnerable man lives or dies in prison, I’m afraid I have no time whatsoever for “Mr Chips” – whoever the sodding hell “Mr Chips” may be.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Swiss politics, but having looked into it as carefully as I can, this appears to be yet another false claim.  It looks as if gender self-ID was introduced by the Swiss parliament, and was not tested in a referendum in the same way that the simultaneous introduction of same-sex marriage was.  It’s also worth making the point that Switzerland is one of only a small minority of European countries that have thus far introduced gender self-ID, which gives the lie to the suggestions elsewhere in the Bella thread that there’s some sort of unstoppable global trend at play here.  Whatever “international best practice” may mean, it certainly doesn’t appear to mean “international common practice”.

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