Spannersplanation urgently required for the Spanner-silence

I've just been down with the lurgy for about a fortnight - I think it was two successive colds, and they were both absolutely wretched.  So when I published the now-famous blogpost on Monday that revealed J K Rowling's misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner" had probably been in Ardrossan when he posted on Twitter on 7th July 2015, I didn't hang around to see the reaction - I turned off the computer, watched a DVD for a little while, and then had a nap.  It wasn't until several hours later that I switched on my phone and discovered that all hell had broken loose in the interim, and that Ardrossan was the eighth highest trending topic in the UK on Twitter.  My amusement at the whole thing gradually started to turn to concern when I saw a rather self-righteous chap called Scott Reid say this : "Somewhere (not Ardrossan, presumably), Nicola Sturgeon looks at her phone, silently screams and hits her head off a wall."

Now, don't get me wrong - I was absolutely clear in my mind that the blogpost had been fully justified. If certain journalists are deliberately giving the public a misleading impression of a story by withholding crucial pieces of information, it's vitally important to try to discover why they're doing that. However, I'm not naive enough to think that a justified action can never backfire, and I did accept the uncomfortable possibility that the SNP leadership might have preferred it if people like me had left well enough alone - even if that meant letting sections of the media get away with absolute murder. But thankfully, my fears that I may have unwittingly caused some damage were very quickly dispelled. Correct me if I overlooked anything, but my search for any news headlines the following morning about "Ardrossangate" drew a complete blank, even in Rowling-obsessed gossipy websites like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post.

Scott Reid and his fellow spannersplainers might want to reflect on this irony : just as it's not possible for J K Rowling to be damaged by her association with Spanner if the media conveniently edit him out of the story, it was also never possible for "Ardrossangate" to harm the SNP in any way if journalists refrained from reporting it due to their determination to protect Spanner. The temptation must have been overwhelming to run mocking, distorted stories about a female Cybernat descending on Ardrossan with a detection-device in one hand and a pitchfork in the other - but, in view of the wider imperatives, they somehow managed to resist it entirely. I did spot one journalist from the local Ardrossan/Saltcoats paper say that he had considered writing a light-hearted piece about the subject, but had decided against it because no-one would have had a sodding clue what he was talking about.

And the wall of silence continues. Just a few hours ago, a news website ran a piece about Natalie McGarry's return to Twitter, and regurgitated the story of her spat with Rowling in a typically one-sided fashion. The misogynistic Mr Spanner was referred to several times - but only indirectly as an "anonymous tweeter", and never by name. I suspect that will have left anyone who doesn't use Twitter with the false impression that no name at all, even a fake one, was ever attached to Spanner's tweets. It drives a coach and horses through Jamie Ross' insistence that the reason Spanner had been edited out of events by journalists was that Rowling and McGarry were the only two people of interest in the story. As it turns out, he's important enough to be mentioned repeatedly, but he absolutely mustn't be named. Why? Spanner is a bogus identity, so there can't possibly be any credible privacy considerations. It's very, very hard to escape the conclusion that a decision has been reached that as little attention as humanly possible should be drawn to Spanner's Twitter account. OK, if members of the public are absolutely determined to locate it, they can't be stopped, but they're not going to receive any encouragement or assistance at all in that direction - presumably because of what they'd find when they get there (both in terms of the content of the account, and the prominent public figures who have very visibly interacted with him and continue to do so).

If there's an alternative spannersplanation, I'd be delighted to hear it from Scott Reid, or Professor James Chalmers, or Jamie Ross, or any of the others. But I have to say I'm really struggling to think of one.

Incidentally, I've been taking another look at this blog's stats. Here are the top ten most viewed blogposts, out of the 2500 or so I've written since May 2008 -

As you can see, two posts from the last couple of weeks, both about Spanner, are already in the top five for all-time page views. It seems that there are at least a good few thousand people out there who beg to differ when they're patted on the head by establishment figures, and told that they wouldn't be remotely interested in hearing the uncensored version of what the Rowling-McGarry dispute was actually about.

Merci, Monsieur Spanner. De nada, Ardrossan.

Well, I hope the people of Ardrossan are duly grateful for my heroic efforts on their behalf today - my previous blogpost single-handedly got them trending on Twitter across the whole UK.

That's Ardrossan in tenth place just after 10pm, and it was at least as high as eighth at one point.

By the same token, I'm deeply grateful to "Brian Spanner", Euan McColm, J K Rowling et al, because their affected "hilarity" over the subject (which I've been privately offered some very intriguing interpretations of) helped this blog to its highest level of traffic in a single day since the general election period last spring.  In all honesty, I'm a bit miffed it wasn't even better than that, but it seems even the magic of Hogwarts has its limitations.

Incidentally, I'm excited to inform you that I actually spent an hour or so on Ardrossan beach last year when I was killing time waiting for the train after a delayed ferry back from Arran.  I'm sure I took some pictures, so I'll study them closely and let you know if I spot any misogynists lurking in the seaweed.

EXCLUSIVE : Has J K Rowling's misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner" been traced to Ardrossan?

A Scot Goes Pop reader has been doing some detective work into the real identity and whereabouts of J K Rowling's notoriously abusive and misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner".  I'll let her email speak for itself, but it's in edited form to avoid any conceivable breaches of privacy.

"On July 7th 2015, Mr Spanner sent this tweet:

"Tonight I will be mostly sending weird pictures to my neighbour's unsecured wireless printer."

In it you can see he tweets the image of the local wifi networks he’s getting from his mac.  (In case you’re not a mac user, I am and can confirm that this is what the network list looks like on one.)
So whoever he is, he’s not skint.

If you look at the top network, you can see that there is a wee mark to the left of it. This is the back end of a tick, indicating that this is the network he’s actually attached to.

There is a website called WiGLE which collates SSIDs for wifi, so I checked this network and it flagged as being based in Ardrossan, next to the beach. It was spotted at this address on the 6th April 2015. Below is the info from WiGLE on it. Beneath the WPA logo are the coordinates.

So, being a belligerent and nosey sort of person, I went down to Ardrossan with my laptop to look for it. And indeed it’s still there. It can be detected fleetingly from the main beach road of ************** Road but it can very reliably be detected from a side street called ***************. Map attached and pics of my picking the network up. I have a wifi scanning file that confirms it, if anybody requires proof."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm seems to have family that hail from Ardrossan and thereabouts, judging from a tweet on 23rd November 2012 -

Euan McColm : "our dads were saltcoats then ardrossan, i think."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm once randomly mentioned the beach at Ardrossan in a Scotsman article -

"I’d have my man or woman outline a vision for the future from Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh’s Royal Mile or the beach at Ardrossan."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm was the first person that "Brian Spanner" ever followed on Twitter, out of 300 million or so possibilities.

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm and "Brian Spanner" both use the C-word on social media far more frequently than the average person.  (Come to think of it, the average person doesn't use the C-word at all.)

Hmmm.  More than anything, I think this is a timely reminder that coincidences are just far, far more common than most of us realise.  For example, did you know that in any given football match, there is a roughly 50/50 chance that two of the players will share the same birthday?  With there only being 22 players on the pitch, and 365 days in the year, many people would think that the chances of that happening are only around 5%.  But nope - it's 50%.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

A question for Labour on abortion law

If anyone from Labour happens to be passing, you might be able to help with a question that's been nagging away at me.  As I understand it, your party believes that the more abortion rights that women have, the better.  Yvette Cooper said the other day that Labour (alone among all major political parties) thinks that the Scottish Parliament can't be trusted to assume control over abortion law because Nicola Sturgeon isn't able to bind her successors.  In other words, Westminster might decide to keep the law in England and Wales as it is, while the Scottish Parliament might eventually restrict access to abortion.  That's possible, but there are of course are at least three other possible outcomes of devolving abortion law -

1) Westminster (which after all has far more social conservatives in it than Holyrood) might restrict access to abortion in England and Wales, while the Scottish Parliament keeps the Abortion Act 1967 unchanged in Scotland.

2) Westminster might keep the law unchanged in England and Wales, while the Scottish Parliament liberalises the law to grant greater abortion rights in Scotland.

3) Both jurisdictions might grant greater abortion rights, with one following the example set by the other.

Two of these three scenarios would lead (from the perspective that Labour claims to take) to improved rights for women in Scotland, while the other would mean that devolution of abortion law had directly prevented women's rights in Scotland from being eroded.  If that came to pass, is it something that Labour would welcome?  Or would they continue to insist on "equality" across Great Britain even when that amounts to an equal lack of rights for women?

If the latter, it seems to me there's a fairly obvious British nationalist agenda at play here, rather than a feminist one.

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There was an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day between RevStu and Jamie Ross of BuzzFeed.  RevStu asked Ross if he was comfortable with the "sneering protective wall" that the media had constructed around J K Rowling's abusive and misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner".  Ross replied that he didn't think there was any protection, merely a "realisation that no one outside Twitter knows or cares about Brian Spanner".  That's something of a circular argument, because there's one reason and one reason only why no-one outside Twitter knows or cares about Brian Spanner, which is that the media haven't told anyone about him.  In fact, they went to extraordinary lengths to edit him out of their extensive coverage of Rowling v McGarry, even though that story made no sense whatever without him.  Contrast that with their eagerness last year to out SNP candidate Neil Hay as "Paco McSheepie" - a Twitter troll account that was far, far less abusive than Brian Spanner, and that, again, nobody would have known or cared about unless journalists had told them.

It's not as if the media aren't in a position to out Spanner.  After my two recent blogposts pointing out the astonishing and totally coincidental links between Spanner and popular journalist Euan McColm, I was struck by the large number of people who came out with a close variation on the following theme : "I have been told by someone I trust that it's not McColm."  To state the bleedin' obvious, it's not possible to know for a fact that Spanner is not McColm (or Deerin, or Daisley, or even Rowling herself) unless you already know the guy's real identity.  That means there are an awful lot of people out there protecting him.  My strong impression is that many of those people are journalists, but even if that isn't the case, it would surely be pretty easy for the media to find out who he is and break the story.  So why don't they?  Was it really in the public interest to out McSheepie, but to protect Spanner?  If so, why?  Or would it be closer to the mark to say that Spanner is a mate of several leading right-wing journalists, and that they're happy to let him act with impunity?

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I was at Murrayfield yesterday for my first ever Scotland-England game, and I fear I must report that triumphalist England supporters murdering what was once a perfectly respectable Christian song aren't any more lovable in the flesh than they are on TV.  You might also be amused to hear that I was sitting next to a kilt-wearing, Scotland-supporting Brit Nat who was incensed that the announcer referred to God Save the Queen as "our visitors' anthem", and got his revenge by belting it out with the England supporters.  He then proceeded to sing Flower of Scotland, but not quite as lustily.  I suppose I've always known that people like that existed, but it was educational to come across one for real.

The misogynistic tweeter, his friendship with J K Rowling, and the ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL link to popular journalist Euan McColm

I do love a lightbulb moment.  About an hour ago, I was trying to dream up a vaguely satirical tweet about the extraordinary way in which J K Rowling is routinely rewarded by her adoring fans in the London media for bullying people on Twitter, and this - in all innocence - is what I came up with...

"In a parallel universe, Euan McColm is the darling of the London media for being beastly to a billionaire SNP-supporting children's author."

But within only a few minutes, I had started wondering if McColm is in fact quite as unconnected as I thought to Rowling's latest antics, and more specifically to the misogynistic tweeter "Brian Spanner" that she once expressed such touching support for. First of all, it became clear from a tweet in December that Stephen "centre-right socialist" Daisley is a mate of Spanner's -

Stephen Daisley : "Oi, "@BrianSpanner1". You about for a coffee tomorrow?"

Secondly, I noticed that I was blocked by McColm on Twitter, even though I couldn't recall any particular trigger for that.

Thirdly, I noticed that I had blocked Spanner in November. I had no recollection of doing so, but when I looked up the relevant exchange (it was a Neil Lovatt spectacular) I couldn't help feeling there was a vague McColm-esque air to the whole thing. Could "Spanner" conceivably have retaliated by blocking me on another account?

Fourthly, Mark Jardine noticed that "Spanner" is the first person listed under the following names : David Torrance, John Rentoul, Iain Martin, Alex Massie, Think Scotland and Euan McColm.

Fifthly, McGlashan noticed that a couple of weeks ago, Spanner randomly said "It is. Thanks." when someone pointed out that it was Euan McColm's birthday. J K Rowling directly responded to Spanner with the words "Happy birthday, Euan".

Of course none of this is remotely conclusive and I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation.

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UPDATE : A few more total coincidences have come to light - see HERE.