Lover of all sports which involve a ball. PSFB
Glasgow, Scotland
Joined August 2008
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Bob Coats retweeted
I remember being absolutely sickened by the commentary at the time.
People I once respected were falling over themselves to portray girls aged just 12 to 14 as racist thugs and aggressors. The implied accusations of racism were disgusting, as was the extraordinary eagerness to condemn children before establishing what had actually happened.
And now we know.
A grown man made sexual remarks towards a 12-year-old girl, assaulted her and behaved threateningly towards four young girls. His sister admitted dragging another girl to the ground by her hair and striking her. The sheriff rejected his account of events.
The punishment? Community service. Not a single day in prison.
I find that utterly disgraceful. What message does that send about the seriousness of intimidating and assaulting children?
But there is another elephant in the room. Class.
I cannot help wondering how differently this would have unfolded had these been middle-class girls from an affluent neighbourhood, rather than working-class girls from Lochee.
Would they have been branded racist thugs quite so readily? Would their distress have been dismissed? Or would we have heard endless lectures about safeguarding, trauma, sexual harassment and violence against women and girls?
I think we know the answer.
There is a particularly ugly form of class prejudice among some of our supposedly enlightened commentators. A frightened middle-class girl is a victim deserving protection. A frightened working-class girl with the wrong accent and postcode is apparently a thug.
And the implied racism narrative made it worse. The nationality of the adults involved should have been irrelevant. Had Scottish adults behaved this way towards Bulgarian girls, I suspect the outrage would have been deafening.
Some people were so desperate to identify racism that they appeared willing to overlook the actual abuse of children.
Police Scotland subsequently acknowledged that its initial account did not fully reflect what happened. @JohnSwinney apologised. But where are the apologies from those who so confidently vilified these girls?
I've spent decades working with people whom respectable society finds easy to dismiss. I know how quickly prejudice can masquerade as moral superiority.
What disturbed me most was watching people who endlessly preach compassion, equality and protecting the vulnerable apparently abandon those principles when the victims didn't fit their preferred political narrative.
I lost respect for people over this. Not because they initially got the facts wrong, but because of how eagerly they embraced a narrative that suited their prejudices. Some of these very people have built entire careers on claiming to speak for and defend the working class. Yet when confronted with vulnerable working-class girls who didn't fit their preferred political narrative, their much-vaunted compassion seemed to evaporate. It was a deeply revealing moment. I learned rather more about their prejudices than I ever did from their lectures about mine.
If your compassion depends on someone's nationality, class, accent or political usefulness, it isn't compassion. It's prejudice dressed up as principle.
These were children. Working-class girls who deserved protection, not public vilification.
And if we've reached the point where protecting a political narrative matters more than protecting children, something has gone very badly wrong.
Shame on those who condemned them. And shame on those who still cannot bring themselves to admit they were wrong.
‼️FINALLY SENTENCED‼️
Bulgarian siblings have finally been sentenced at Dundee Sheriff Court for attacking Scottish girls in Lochee, Dundee, in August 2025.
Ilia Belov, 23, was given a community payback order of 300 hours’ unpaid work with 18 months’ supervision, and 18 months on the sex offenders register, for assaulting a then 12-year-old and for threatening or abusive behaviour towards four girls aged 12–14.
Nadjedzha Belova, 20, was given 180 hours’ unpaid work after admitting she seized a 13-year-old by the hair, dragged her to the ground and struck her on the head.
The court heard Ilia Belov told a 12-year-old: “Come here sexy. I will show you how to have a good time”. He then pushed her and her head hit a metal handrail. Only after that did she produce the axe and knife she had in her waistband.
Sheriff Niven-Smith rejected his story (that he never made sexual remarks and only pushed her to protect his sister) as neither credible nor reliable. The sheriff found his comments were the trigger for the incident.
Just remember how this all went down at the time though:
👉🏻 The police initially tried to flip the narrative, framing the perpetrators as victims and vice versa, stating the Bulgarians were approached by the young girls. The 12-year-old girl was subsequently arrested and charged over the weapons, and her self-defence was dismissed as “misinformation”.
👉🏻 Commentators and parts of the media also spent months implying the child was the threat, and the adults were the victims.
👉🏻 John Swinney warned the public off the footage, then had to subsequently apologise to the girl.
👉🏻 Sentencing was delayed twice, in August and September, because social work reports were not ready. Fourteen months from the attack to a sentence and, after all that, no jail time.
So, two adults of foreign descent, one of them making sexual remarks, assault young Scottish girls walking the streets of their native homeland and the first instinct of the authorities was to protect the narrative, charge the child, and gaslight the public.
This is what happens when the safety of women and children is treated as secondary to managing the story about immigration.
Bob Coats retweeted
- Miserable pipsqueak
- A demented Dalek on speed
- A foetus in a jar
These are just a fraction of the insults directed at @michaelgove by @UKLabour and its activists during his time as Education Secretary. All this pearl-clutching from Labour MPs in relation to @KemiBadenoch's row with @bphillipsonMP is pathetic. They need to get over themselves. @bphillipsonMP's class war has caused school closures, cost people their jobs and messed up the education of countless children, many of them with special needs. She deserves to be called out for it. 'Spiteful class warrior' is the least of it.
184 years. 😂😂😂
Air pollution is one of the biggest threats we face, but it’s a problem we can solve.
Bold action in the capital has helped us meet legal limits 184 years faster than expected.
My piece for @Guardian with @MikeBloomberg on how London and NYC have cleaned up our air👇🏽
Bob Coats retweeted
While we are doing our autopsies of Keir Starmer’s unimpressive premiership, I’d like to suggest he is a prime example of a certain personality type that causes us problems.
He has been a high achiever his whole life. From the 11+ onwards he passed tests and ascended every hierarchy he found himself in. This, I believe, shaped his worldview in a way that made him absolutely unsuited for the office.
For Starmer, you accept the rules of the system, you play the game, and when you win you get rewards. Number 10 was just the last objective that he earned by mechanically playing society like a video game - it was his by right for ticking all the boxes correctly.
His visible confusion and inability to grasp the job of actual leadership is, I think, a result of never having had to deal with the world beyond whichever social game he was playing at the time. Law is such a bounded game where a rigid, goal oriented thinker like Starmer can and did thrive.
A better leader would be someone who has some experience doing something which contacts base reality, where outcomes are not socially determined. Business, STEM, the military etc all fall into this category. Those people who spend their careers in the purely social feedback loops of law and politics do I think make poor leaders even if they excel at the process that gets them to the leadership.
Bob Coats retweeted
Just to make it clear because people keep thinking that my abusers are just getting their sentences reduced to half way when they are not... my abusers were convicted of multiple rapes and sentenced to between 16 and 20 years, EACH. That was reduced to 50% last year, it is now being assessed to be reduced to 33%.... meaning if they are accepted, they will get out this year after serving just 7 YEARS out of their 16 to 20 year sentences.....
Treated with contempt. Cowards
A brief update on the @Indep_Inq_GG “Grooming gang” Inquiry…
This week the Inquiry panel for the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs (the official title, not my choice of words) was questioned by the Home Affairs Select Committee. We hadn’t been made aware this was taking place and only found out on the day via a social media post and hence we couldn’t let our survivors know in advance. Much of what was said however has left us with more questions than it answered in all honesty. What was repeated was the importance of placing victims and survivors at the “heart of the panel”!!!
This is what that has looked like so far…….
We have not heard from the Inquiry team since we took over two dozen survivors and their families to meet with them in February. In that emotionally charged meeting, survivors spoke about their experiences and their anger at how badly they have been failed, most for decades. They shared their expertise and expectations for the Inquiry.
Their anger and trauma was palpable, and most of that was actually directed at the “establishment” including police, cps, social services, government rather than towards their abusers tbh! They clearly demanded the agencies that have failed them (and still are in many cases!) are held ACCOUNTABLE, right up to the top of those agencies!
In early March, we submitted both our and the survivors’ extensive comments to the draft Terms of Reference. We have received no reply.
In April, our legal team @HoweAndCo wrote to the Inquiry on behalf of all our survivor group expressing the importance of victims and survivors being granted proper legal status in the Inquiry and public funding to ensure they can be properly represented by legal experts. This will go some way to addressing the imbalance between survivors and the very agencies, organisations and individuals whose decisions have caused so much of their trauma. Police forces and local authorities around the country will have undoubtedly been working with their legal teams since the inquiry was announced almost a year ago.
This is PRECISELY the imbalance I saw 8 years ago when I was involved in the @IICSAVSCP Independent Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Because the “Organised networks” strand became little more than a platform for public institutions to say what a great job they were now going with barely any survivors heard, it became a meaningless paper exercise and that’s imo why we’re here now….
I’ll leave you to read the Home Office’s response attached below and our reply and make up your own mind as to whether we should have confidence that this will be granted.
So many survivors have fought hard for this Inquiry. People are sharing traumatic details of the worst times of their lives again in the hope that they will finally see people held accountable for decisions that destroyed their lives. Survivors must have legal status and representation if there is even the slightest chance of this happening.
Please share far and wide. We need people pressure to make this happen. Further updates to follow next week….
Bob Coats retweeted
Scotland swapped a Secretary of State and six ministers for a billion-pound parliament, a six-billion-pound quango state and 25 years of constitutional psychodrama. Hard to call that progress.
Bob Coats retweeted
A British school dinner in 1975 was cooked on-site, from whole ingredients, by a dinner lady who knew, without consulting a nutritional database, what a growing child needed to eat.
The dinner was: roast beef, gravy from the drippings, boiled potatoes, cabbage, and sponge pudding with custard made from eggs and milk. Or shepherd's pie from real mince. Or liver and onions. Or fish on Friday, battered and fried in beef dripping.
In a single sitting: haem iron from the meat, calcium from the custard, B12 from the liver, vitamin A from the gravy fat, vitamin D from the eggs, zinc from the beef, omega-3 from the fish, collagen from the gravy, complete protein from every component, and roughly 800 calories dense enough to carry a child through an afternoon of running around a playground in January.
Then the system changed.
In the 1980s and 1990s, local authority catering was outsourced. On-site kitchens closed. Dinner ladies were made redundant. Central production kitchens began manufacturing meals reheated in convection ovens.
The roast beef became a turkey twizzler. The shepherd's pie became a pre-formed disc of processed potato and reconstituted meat product. The liver disappeared entirely. The fish was coated in breadcrumbs and fried in vegetable oil. The custard was made from powder, water, and yellow colouring. The sponge pudding was replaced by a yoghurt tube.
Jamie Oliver's 2005 campaign filmed children who could not identify a tomato. Kitchens where the only equipment was a deep fryer and a microwave. Menus that contained less nutritional value in a full week than the 1975 dinner contained in a single sitting.
The government pledged reform. But the on-site kitchen did not come back. The dinner lady did not come back. The roast beef and the liver and the custard made from eggs did not come back.
The 1975 dinner lady, who had no nutritional qualification and had never heard of a DIAAS score, was producing, at approximately 30p per serving, a meal that contained more bioavailable nutrition than anything the modern system produces at three times the cost.
She has been replaced by a supply chain.
The supply chain is more expensive.
The children are less well fed.
The dinner lady knew what she was doing.
Nobody asked her.
Bob Coats retweeted
Today is the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's best seller The Wealth of Nations. Pretty much the best guide to group prosperity ever written. Now is the perfect time to re read it...
Bob Coats retweeted
Someone will ask why an account about nutrition and training has made a dozen posts on a bull in Ledbury, a goat without borders, and a ewe with a complicated relationship with topographic dips.
Here is why.
Because the argument that these animals are destroying the planet is not a fringe position. It is in the newspaper. It is in the policy document. It is in the dietary guideline. It is being taught to children and repeated by adults and acted on by governments and it is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific, demonstrable, measurable way that becomes obvious the moment you look at an actual field with an actual animal in it.
Gerald is not an abstraction.
Keith is not a statistic.
Doris is not a carbon calculation.
They are specific, real, working animals doing specific, real, measurable things to specific, real pieces of land, and the argument against them has never once required anyone to look at the land.
So we looked.
And the land is fine.
The land is better than fine.
The land is a meadow in Ledbury, a fell in the Lake District, and a Devon field with a rank corner that Keith has been improving without Brian's permission for four months.
Come back tomorrow.
There's more.
Marvel has the Avengers.
DC has the Justice League.
We have Gerald, Keith, and Doris.
Three farm animals, each maintaining their respective ecosystems in the specific way that only their species can, connected by the shared experience of being told they are the problem by people who have never been outside.
Gerald cannot fly.
Keith can get through any fence in Britain.
Doris got cast in a dip and walked away with such dignity that the dip hasn't been mentioned since.
Their powers are: rumination, persistence, and the particular stoicism of animals that have been doing exactly the right thing for thousands of years and don't need your opinion about it to continue.
The cinematic universe begins now.
You're not ready.
Bob Coats retweeted
David Toshack — a trainee Prison Custody Officer in Scotland— was sacked for refusing to call male prisoners “she/her”.
David was praised throughout five weeks of training and participated thoughtfully in discussions, including those on managing trans prisoners.
He explained that, due to his Christian beliefs and his understanding of “science, biology and reality”, he could not, in good conscience, use pronouns that conflicted with biological sex.
The former army medic, who served in Iraq, Kenya and Afghanistan, said he would be more than happy to use neutral language where possible and refer to prisoners by their chosen name — a respectful compromise.
His position — rightly — went unchallenged until the final week, when the safeguarding lead asked him to leave the session after he reiterated that he could only use sex-based pronouns.
David was taken to HR and immediately dismissed for being “not suitable” due to his “strong beliefs”. Usual disciplinary channels were ignored, and no attempt was made to accommodate those beliefs.
The company — GeoAmey — claimed David’s refusal to use preferred pronouns was incompatible with “the law”, despite the belief he expressed being protected under the Equality Act 2010. Last April, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, under the Equality Act, a woman is defined by biological sex, not gender identity.
The Free Speech Union is supporting David’s challenge to his dismissal. The failings in this case suggest the decision was predetermined, and that the real issue was David’s lawful gender-critical beliefs — not his competence or conduct.
David’s case could set an important legal precedent against compelled ideological conformity in the workplace.
Nobody should lose their livelihood for expressing lawful and protected beliefs.
Please do support David by contributing to his crowdfunder at the link below 👇
Bob Coats retweeted
Call me sadly out of touch if you like @Keir_Starmer, @JohnSwinney, but I find this whole concept of breakfast clubs to be one of the saddest indictments of modern society that there is. Never left the house without breakfast, and my mum always walked me to school.
Bob Coats retweeted
The smuggling of Starlink into Iran is doing more to advance the overthrow of the Islamic theocrats than any number of bombs and bullets. Starlink makes dissent possible, and Elon Musk made Starlink possible. Why do British ministers find publicly acknowledging this so hard?
I asked the Minister to thank Elon Musk for getting Starlink into Iran to help protestors get information out. She didn’t want to !!! @elonmusk
Bob Coats retweeted
Holy sh*t.
I’ve been banned from traveling to the UK. They revoked my ETA.
"Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conductive to the public good."
3 days after posting this about Starmer.
Bob Coats retweeted
If you claim to support human rights yet can’t bring yourself to show solidarity with those fighting for their liberty in Iran, you’ve revealed yourself. You don’t give a damn about people being oppressed and brutalised so long as it’s being done by the enemies of your enemies.
Bob Coats retweeted
I do not normally respond to online rumors but feel the need to do so at this moment
I will not be a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.
While you never know what the future may bring right now my focus must remain on global events and also the precious archives of the United States of America.
Thank you
Bob Coats retweeted
I’m not allowed to say it in Parliament, but I can here: today the Prime Minister lied and lied and lied again. And he did so to smear a man defending our veterans in court against the Labour government.
Labour have attacked everyone from farmers, to businesses, to veterans, so now they attack David Wolfson, a brilliant KC, to take the attention away from their terrible decisions.
I’m proud to have David in my team. He doesn’t deserve to have his name smeared by low-rent politicians trying to distract from their own failures.
What little integrity the Prime Minister held he surrendered with that shameful performance today.
Bob Coats retweeted
An excellent, well-informed and genuinely current piece from @ChrisMusson. This is journalism at its best. Careful, evidence-led, and free of ideological reflex. In an area as distorted by dogma as drug policy, reporting like this does more than inform. It has the potential to save thousands of lives.
CHRIS MUSSON Lazy SNP drug policies are keeping addicts hooked – we need rehab, not quick fixes
'The SNP’s instinct is division and it’s the same with drugs policy. You’re either with them, or against them.'
thescottishsun.co.uk/news/15…
Bob Coats retweeted
I want to hear what Winsford town council parks and cemeteries committee have to say on the matter
First Minister @JohnSwinney has commented on the unfolding situation in Venezuela, urging the international community to ensure that de-escalation, diplomacy and democracy are the foundations of what follows.
