It only takes a single face-painted rainbow cop

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Wings Over Scotland tells us he’s closing down at least temporarily.

In the meantime you can hear of any developments, or get in touch, on my personal account @RevStu or on @TheGhostOfWings, both of which have had, or are about to have, all their old tweets wiped.

We’re not going to overdramatise, because we hope this is only for a few days. We’re optimistic that the Scottish Government’s abysmal, sinister and totalitarian Hate Crime Act, opposed across every sector of Scottish society and even by the police charged with implementing it, will not put an end to 12 and a half years of political journalism.

But you can’t write or tweet from a prison cell.

The Scottish Government and judicial system have repeatedly shown their eagerness to jail those whose views they consider troublesome. The SNP, driven insane by too many years of power, fundamentally consider ANY dissent to be a hate crime, and they and their client groups are champing at the bit to weaponise this law to that effect, and explicitly and specifically against this site.

“Their client groups” appear to include quite a few gender ideologues.

Our confidence in the police to apply any sort of sanity in the face of a deluge of co-ordinated complaints is essentially zero. Even if the vast majority of vexatious and malicious reports are ignored, it only takes a single face-painted rainbow cop who’s been “trained” by a hardline transactivist pressure group to take one of them seriously, and boom, you’re in a cell, with every electronic device you own locked up in a police-station cupboard for the next few months.

The Rev shares a slew of rainbow-decorated cop photos.

(Have you ever seen a Scottish polis attending an event with their face painted or their car bedecked in the suffragette colours for International Women’s Day this month, or flying a flag for Disability History Month, readers?)

Women mattered (a little) for around four decades, but then their contract expired.

So that’s the situation. We hope we won’t be gone too long, but Scotland is no longer a country where free speech is permitted, and even not living there may not afford much in the way of protection. Make no mistake, folks – even as we enter summertime in the early hours of Sunday morning, the lights will be going out all across the country.

I hope he’s exaggerating…

H/t NightCrow

Comments

2 responses to “It only takes a single face-painted rainbow cop”

  1. KBPlayer Avatar
    KBPlayer

    Hmm – I think Wings is too big to touch, like J K Rowling.

  2. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    Hmm – I think Wings is too big to touch, like J K Rowling.

    For Wings, maybe not too big for “the process” to do what it’s supposed to do:

    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”.

    Wings has already experienced the technique. 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.

    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).

    Even bags of badges and promo items were taken. I kept one as a souvenir.

    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.

    (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.)

    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 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.

    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.

    https://wingsoverscotland.com/into-darkness/#more-141930

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