The ALBA Party has reported tweets apparently suggesting physical threats against their female candidates to the police. The reported tweets included those from a male Green Party candidate for the North East of Scotland.
The comments followed reports from an ALBA women’s Conference at the weekend where a Twitter spat erupted over reported comments of ALBA Central Scotland candidate Margaret Lynch. Ms Lynch was expressing her concerns at a safe space Conference and none of the attacks upon her come from people who actually heard her comments directly.
The Twitter reports did not in any event accurately reflect the concerns expressed by Ms Lynch about two Scottish based organisations among others supporting an international group that have openly advocated decriminalisation around adolescent sexual behaviour. Despite a statement from ALBA which fully accepted that Stonewall Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland were “reputable organisations who had done much good in society” the stream of online abuse continued and spilled over into direct threats including the proposed organisation of meetings to target people individually and the suggestion to Dundee Council that an ALBA candidate, a primary teacher of 36 years standing, was somehow not a fit person be teaching.
Party Leader and Former First Minister Alex Salmond said:
“This was a safe space Conference where ALBA women were encouraged to express their concerns over a range of subjects. It resulted in our Party’s policy statement on Women and Equalities.
“Women participating are entitled to do so without being subjected to Twitter pile-ons or even worse threats of violence. Thus we are drawing the line.
“People who threaten our women candidates will be held to account. Men who put at risk women’s jobs and livelihoods will be faced down. Name-calling of ALBA women by male SNP MPs and candidates will be challenged, and media who fan the flames of this disturbing behaviour will be reported to the appropriate regulator.
“In an election campaign people often do fand say foolish things but we shall not have our female candidates bullied or threatened. That stops right now. Apart from anything else Margaret Lynch was defending the rights of women in Scottish society while these keyboard warriors were in nappies. The irony of people advocating hate speech legislation while simultaneously resorting themselves to physical threat and bullying behaviour is substantial.
“Let me be clear. As the First Minister who introduced equal marriage in Scotland, I would never tolerate any homophobic behaviour.
“Women are entitled to raise concerns without being targeted in this fashion. If people wish to disagree then by all means go ahead. But our candidates are entitled to speak their minds at safe space events without being traduced or intimidated. ALBA will protect their right to do so. ILGA World has issued a statement providing clarification which I welcome.
“The Women and Equalities Policy we have passed is cogent and reasonably expressed. It calls for positive and engaged debate on how we can reconcile the search for equality with the protection of hard-won rights and sex-based safe spaces. It calls for a Citizens Assembly to work through these principles in an informed manner.
“It says things which have long needed saying in Scottish society and does so in an entirely positive way. That is how ALBA shall conduct the debate.
“Now that this particular matter has been reported to the police ALBA will make no further comment on this specific controversy. We have also referred the hacking of data from the Women’s Conference given the degree of the individual threats now being made.
“The ALBA Women ad Equalities Policy Statement will continue to be a major feature of our election campaign. All ALBA candidates will conduct that debate in a considered and responsible manner.”
Good.
This should have happened a long, long time ago. Could someone ask mrs murrell why it didn’t ?
What on earth has happened to our country? The hatred expressed online is truly dreadful. This is not the country that we want for us or our families. Every party leader, including the First Minister, should come out and condemn this behaviour. I pray to God that this does not escalate.
Exactly what Sturgeon should have been doing in the SNP. How can she stand there and talk about “the women” when she is damaging more women than anyone.
I can’t understand why anyone who displays thuggish, bullying behaviour online can even be considered as a candidate for our parliament. It denigrates the standing of Holyrood as an institution.
Whatever happened to stateman like behaviour?
We have been calling for action on this issue for several years now. There is a sickness at the heart of politics and society right now, and we either root it out or we will go down with it and not recover. However, we should not forget that grown men punched and kicked Suffragettes, pulled their hair out, destroyed their meeting places and their toilet facilities, use lewd language to try and shock them and called for women to be silenced. It is not new. The internet has allowed a much more vicious and vile form of abuse. This is wandering, uninvited, into the realm of sadism. Threatening people and trying to destroy their livelihoods should be a custodial matter – and in a men’s prison.
I agree with you, Lorna. You’re very wise to apply a historical perspective, citing the abominable behaviour of some men towards the Suffragettes all those years ago. The same type of barbaric individuals and splinter-groupings are still with us, it would seem, if under new flags. Everything changes while nothing changes. I should say: the above is not intended as a testament of despair, but as a statement of observed fact. Nor should it be taken as a statement of complacency. Fire must be fought with fire.
We have a small group of “disturbed” men who appear to have captured the Political Parties, influenced the Police, terrified schools and Universities into blind obedience.
How did this happen?
Simple! You threaten, bully, insult and cry that you are the victim.
They know that most people are just trying to live their life in peace and trust politicians to do the right thing. They use that fact to push extreme ideology forward bit by bit. When the public are informed they shout down the flag wafer and scream “..phobic”.
They will not be happy until the World considers them normal and YOU as the outsider.
Why are the big pharmaceutical companies throwing millions at this madness – future profit!
I think it is now without doubt that 5here is a vicious nasty sexually driven strand of individuals who a best can be described as trans warriors.
Whether it is plastic in the water, pesticide or hormone pollution, or learned behaviour promoted by groups representing themselves as sexual freedom fighters I don’t know, but it is without doubt there are some now very weird individuals out there wanting to turn society upside down.
Indeed, take Patrick Harvie of the Greens who is absolutely transfixed with trans rights. Trans are only a small minority, or were, so why the absolute obsession with them to the exclusion and detriment of all others.
Or what of his demand that more resources be applied to trans health when the country is struggling through coronavirus to deliver cancer treatment, cardiac surgery, joint replacement and other mainstream medical treatments.
Or of his demands at the week end that women demanding women’s rights be challenged daily. 0r of the wider lurking proposal to set all adolescents free and allow sex with ten year olds and over.
This is not normal. In fact it is utterly abnormal and unacceptable. Vile and ugly and yet it is part of the focus of our current government. Me, after nearly forty years an SNP member I will no5 be voting for them in May, nor their equally weird party the Scottish Greens. Vile perverts, who would abuse women, children and the sick.
Willie: I think that, far beyond the validation that trans women (men) seem to be determined to have at the expense of natal women, is the determination to actually oust women. I really do not think that they want dialogue and debate and to rationalize their behaviour.
The trans lobby wants to push the ‘trans women are women’ agenda because it will allow hundreds of thousands of self-ID-ed males to encroach on every aspect of women’s lives and take them over. If the courts are prepared to state that, legally, trans women could comprise the entire female contingent in any given space or area of work, expertise, etc., – and they have already done so – that will be the end of the line for natal women.
We will have to start all over again and call ourselves something else, creating our own spaces anew, campaigning for funding and so on – and a few years down the line, the trans lobby will start up against us again and start encroaching again – precisely because that is the agenda. This is the ultimate aim of the trans lobby: to completely oust women and girls from any and all spaces occupied by them under the law as sex-based spaces.
Our rights, too, will become their rights. They will have their rights as trans people and our rights as women, and they will still be men. That’s the point. The stupidity of politicians and those who support them is beyond rational explanation – or deliberate? Save money by amalgamating spaces and not having to create third spaces? Have 50% men and 50%… er… men. What does that equal? Gosh, who would have thought: 100% men.
I think that the short-termism of most politicians makes them unable and unwilling to see beyond the next few years – that, coupled with a goodly dose of gross stupidity which defies logic. And all in the name of being kind. We are being conned and scammed big time and we know it – and the politicians know it, but they don’t want aggro from trans women, the vicious trans lobby, and they want to save a few bawbees. Better to pretend to be wilfully blind than to be threatened with losing your fat pension. Just be kind, women and know your place.