These two Sunday front pages three weeks apart sounded awfully similar.
But it turned out to be a lot worse than we thought.
Not just because the Sunday Post ran basically the exact same story seven years ago:
But because the Post’s piece is based on the exact same piece of garbage non-news that the Herald’s was last month, and which the Post apparently just caught up with.
Engender is a wholly-Scottish-Government-funded lobbying quango that exists for no other reason than to channel juicy salaries into the pockets of a handful of professional “feminists”, of the sort who can then be relied upon to unwaveringly support all of the Scottish Government’s attacks on women’s rights.
We took a look at the Herald’s story three weeks ago and discovered that what the Post calls a “landmark report” (we can only hope that was a typo for “landfill”) was a deeply suspect one which revealed precisely nothing about misogyny, only the fact that all politicians of both sexes get a lot of abuse. Not a single scrap of it provided any proof that there was a tangible difference between female and male politicians, or that the motivation for it was sexist in nature.
But the Post rehashes it anyway, adding nothing more than a sprinkling of “celebrity” sheen as Sturgeon, Dugdale and Davidson – along with Monica Lennon, who for some reason doesn’t get to feature on the cover – lend their faces and contribute a few lines of vague generic whining on the subject.
(Former SNP/Tory MP Lisa Cameron also appears with a horrible tale of a real-world stalker, but which has no discernible connection to either the report or to misogyny.)
Which is of course a little bit ironic, as they’re hardly innocents in the field of abuse themselves. Dugdale, alert readers may recall, was found by two Scottish courts to have smeared and defamed the editor of this website with false allegations of bigotry in 2017 in a newspaper column and in Parliament, where Sturgeon backed her up. She has never apologised nor expressed any sort of remorse over the falsehoods, even though her behaviour was so appalling it cost her her relationship with her father until his tragic death in 2021.
Sturgeon herself infamously made similar slurs against campaigning gender-critical feminists, suggesting that they were homophobic AND racist, and has made her general distaste for men abundantly clear.
And the Post also saw fit to include comments from discrimination beneficiary and SNP councillor Fatima Joji, who was involved in compiling the document. (Which has now been published, and sure enough contains absolutely nothing in the way of actual verifiable data in its 73 pages. If you misbehave, we’ll write another article and make you read some of the word-salad wonkspeak drivel contained in it.)
…and who in 2023 was formally censured by the Standards Commission For Scotland for “personally offensive and gratuitous” comments calling this site’s editor “toxic scum”, amongst other slurs in repeated tirades of abuse and baseless accusations.
Obviously the Scottish Government, which is yet to meet with For Women Scotland in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment on the Equality Act several months ago, rushed to confirm it would be discussing the “findings” of the “report” with its faithful client organisation so that they could all agree how terrible it all was and all the abuse in politics was other people’s fault, especially men, and definitely not all the female politicians who are happy to dish abuse out but not to take it.
So we can probably expect to read the exact same story yet again in a few months when they announce the outcome of their discussions with a great fanfare. We’ll try to contain our excitement if you will, folks.
