Rhiannon Spear Glasgow City Council Councillor and SNP politician is quitting politics blaming “relentless abuse” for her decision.

About Rhiannon Spear

Education: 2017 – 2021: the University of Glasgow LLBLaw (Doubled up as the SNP Councillor for Pollok)
2008 – 2012: University of Glasgow MA Creative and Cultural Studies Film and Television (summer workplace experience in television production)
2002 – 2006: Rothesay Academy. Highers (A, A, A, B, B) English, History, Maths, Art, Physics

Personality: She is strikingly attractive, highly intelligent and gifted with a natural ability to attract attention, unfortunately not always to her benefit. She is feisty, strong-willed and determined to succeed at any task she is minded to take on. She is media savvy and possesses first-class skills including the production of excellent graphics for social media presentation and discussion. One of her many character weaknesses is her abject inability to accept criticism and her single-minded approach to her work. She needs to learn that political life is not a Religion and she is not the Pope.

Relationships: Her partner, is Rhys Crilley, a native of Wakefield in West Yorkshire. A gifted academic, prolific writer and university lecturer at Glasgow University whose primary interests are in war, militarism, scandals and outrage. He also maintains close political relationships with senior SNP leaders and actively supports the policies to which his partner and the SNP are committed.

Politics: Joined the SNP in 2011. Jointly founded Generation Yes, the national youth campaign for independence in the run-up to the 2014 referendum. National Convenor of YSI for two years from 2015–17. Elected to the SNP’s NEC in 2016. Scottish Parliament Candidate for the Glasgow List in 2016. Elected Councillor for Greater Pollok in 2017. Successfully proposed motions at SNP Conference on all-female lists, inclusive education and raising the age of military recruitment to 18. Chairs TIE the LBGTI government-funded charity which is remitted to support Scottish Education bodies providing LGBT-inclusive education in Scottish Schools. Actively promoted the #Metoo movement denouncing sexual harassment on campus at the University of Glasgow.

LBGTI: She is the driving force behind WOKE campaigning individuals, groups, charities and formal groups promoting and implementing the WOKE agenda in all state schools in Scotland. The bulk of WOKE activities, including resources and staffing, (£3-5M) is funded by the Scottish taxpayer through the SNP government. The unhealthy influence of WOKE minded politicians is being planted across all aspects of Scottish society as each day passes.

2008-2014: Glasgow Unversity

Speaking about her experiences from 2008 until 2012 at the University of Glasgow where she was a Creative and Cultural Studies student said, “My experience of university was that rape culture was commonplace and male sexual aggression was normalised.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it since, trying to come to terms with that environment, and it has been a long process. I was sexually assaulted. I had naked pictures taken of me while I slept which were shared in group chats. That was common for girls, and people don’t realise how common it is.

Hyper heteronormative shows of masculinity by young men in their late teens and early 20s fuelled by lots of alcohol and a need to perform in front of friends. Groping hands, pulling off clothes and men exposing themselves to you on the dance floor in the union were all part of a night out.

Then there were the darker things that happened behind closed doors which were definitely not consensual that I am only now coming to terms with. At one event a guy dragged me into a cupboard, exposed himself to me and demanded I had sex with him. I remember saying that I didn’t want to touch him, and I wanted to get out. I did get out and I wanted to report it at the time, but I knew there was no point.

Then there was waking up to a guy having sex with me, I was sick as soon as I realised what was happening. I am only now able to call that what it really was.” (Glasgow Evening Times)

Young Scots for Independence: Young Scots for Independence (YSI) (SNP Youth) is represented on the SNP National Executive Committee and sends delegates to meetings of the SNP Annual National Conference.

Many YSI activists have since risen to prominence in the SNP, including Rhiannon Spear, Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney and Fiona Hyslop.

In 2012, Humza Yousaf then a member of the YSI, was promoted to Government as Minister for International Development.

The YSI first flexed its muscle at the annual conference in 2012 when the Party debated NATO membership. The YSI decided on opposing membership because it was a nuclear alliance. Despite gaining 48% of the vote, the anti-NATO group lost and the SNP policy is now pro-NATO membership.

Jan 2014: Generation Yes

Generation Yes was established in January 2014 by Rhiannon Spear and Kirsten Thornton to campaign for a yes vote amongst young voters in the referendum on Scottish Independence. Despite the defeat, a poll taken after the 2014 referendum showed 71% of teenagers had voted yes. Spear said: We will continue to campaign for full enfranchisement in all elections for people aged 16 and 17.

Time for Inclusive Education (TIE)

2015: Founded by Jordan Daly (now with Stonewall) and Liam Stevenson, TIE raised awareness of the isolation and bullying faced by young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Scotland. In 2017, the Scottish Government launched a TIE led working group with the task of embedding LGBTI-inclusive education in the schools’ curriculum of Scotland.

Nov 2018: Scotland became the first country in the world to include compulsory LGBTI issues in school curricula after the government accepted in full a report from Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) outlining 33 recommendations on how to tackle LGBTI bullying in schools.

Scottish Deputy First Minister John Swinney said that state schools across Scotland will be required to educate pupils on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex issues, including LGBTI history, terminology and identities, and ways of tackling homophobia and prejudice. Other recommendations include providing training programs for teachers and offering new teaching materials to tackle LGBTI issues.

The First Minister gave the group her personal endorsement at Holyrood, telling MSPs: “I am a supporter of the TIE campaign, not just in their objectives but in the spirited way they go about trying to make sure that their objectives are taking forward. They will work with decision-makers, produce curriculum resources, and deliver services for teachers and pupils to raise awareness and heighten knowledge.” Swinney promised to fund the new programmes and additional teaching resources to support LGBTI-inclusive education.

All state schools now have to teach LGBTI equality and inclusion as part of the curriculum, including the teaching of LGBTI terminology and identities, tackling homophobia and prejudice, and the history of the equalities movement.

TIE was granted charitable status and appointed a Board of Trustees led by Rhiannon Spear who on her appointment said: “The campaign has challenged us all to think about what is possible. Although The Scottish Government’s announcement to Parliament, that LGBT-inclusive education will become a reality, has been the culmination of three years work – it is truly just the beginning.”

2019: TIE, the charity launched less than a year ago is in deep financial trouble as it prepared to upscale its operations. A spokesperson said that funding promised by the Government had not yet been provided and money was needed to fund the “massive demand” for its services.

The dissolution of TIE is a certainty without sustainable funding, of staff and resources. Expectations are that the charity will need to be supported by recurring annual funding of around £500,000.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “We are fully aware of the funding difficulties currently being experienced by the TIE Campaign. We are carefully considering all options to further support the TIE Campaign in its important work with schools in Scotland.” The charity got its money and some.

Aug 2018: Loud, white men must get with the times: In a Tweet, Rhiannon Spear said: This week, I pointed out that an all-male panel at a political event was inadequate and called for at least one woman to be a voice. In response, I was called sexist and a fraud, sworn at, accused of being a BBC plant and labelled anti-independence by an online cohort made up overwhelmingly of white, older men. Apparently, being an elected representative of the SNP and dedicated campaigner for Scottish independence doesn’t meet the bar set to be a Yes voter.

Jan 2019: Rhiannon Spear, SNP Councillor scolds Andy Murray’s mother for Sharing a Pro-Women’s Rights Article: Scotland’s most eminent Women’s Tennis Coach, posted a link to an article on Twitter from Scottish newspaper, The National, about the importance of learning the lessons about the impact of transgenderism on women in Canada. Responding Spear took Judy to task for sharing a “transphobic and 14 years out of date article” hinted that she had not read the article in its entirety.

Spear’s response was met with an onslaught of criticism, for the sanctimonious and patronising tone of her tweet (for implying Murray shared something she hadn’t read) and the implicit ageism (suggesting she was out of touch with modern Scottish attitudes) and misogyny (assuming she didn’t fully understand what she had tweeted because, if she did, then presumably she wouldn’t identify with it because of the fact she’s a woman) in her tweets. She was also admonished for being out of touch with, and completely failing to comprehend, the relevant legislation she accused Murray of being out of step with. Her response to criticisms was less than acceptable.

Spear leads the government-funded TIE campaign in Scotland, which promotes gender ideology in our schools and the thought of this woman having any influence on school children is of increasing concern to many parents. Also of concern is her oft-repeated assertion that feminism is wack because it reduces womanhood to genitalia and reproductive ability. Then when a Scottish journalist offered that reducing womanhood to genitalia was already happening as a direct result of trans activism, not feminism, she accused the journalist of whipping up mob hysteria by fear. https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3489880-Glasgow-Councillor-Tries-to-Scold-Judy-Murray

Jan 2019: Comments: Moll: This is very much her modus operandi with respect to every political topic she gets involved with: You’re either with her or against her. The last time she publicly maligned a popular pro-Scottish independence blogger as a transphobe and got exactly the same reaction. She maligned his 56k followers as being “part of the problem”, a huge portion of which belongs to her own political party and share her political ambitions. She’s very much of the view that if you don’t agree with her, then it’s because you need to reflect more. In my view, she’s a toxic extremist. And for all her qualms about not being reduced to her reproductive capacities, she wasn’t above using her miscarriage to garner up sympathy for herself and get her sycophants to go after a man she couldn’t have a reasoned discussion with.

Apr 2019: SNP politician accused of “promoting” sex work: Councillor Rhiannon Spear, chair of the TIE campaign which has successfully lobbied for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender education to be embedded in Scotland’s schools sparked claims from SNP colleagues she was “advocating” prostitution by posting a controversial tweet and a selfie with fellow SNP Councillor Christina Cannon, dominatrix Megara Furie and another unnamed woman at Glasgow City Chambers, saying “brilliant meeting Megara Furie + bringing sex workers into the City Chambers. Sex workers rights are human rights.”

Following up on social media she added, “Yesterday I met with Megara Furie to talk all things sex work. Did you know sex work includes trixs, submissives, cam work, phone + text services, dancers, masseuses, porn, escorting etc it’s not all street-based sale of sex?”

Another tweet from Spear enraged colleagues who said it questioned the law on pimping. She wrote “It’s currently illegal for workers to work together. It is illegal for a man (but not a woman) to live on money earned through sex work. So it would be illegal to live with your boyfriend. Does that sound safe?”

But SNP sources angrily claimed the tweets “promoted” sex work which SNP policy condemns as a form of violence against women. An SNP insider who withheld her name hit out at the tweets, saying they were “advocating prostitution”. and added “her views are not the views of the SNP nationally, or Glasgow’s SNP group.” and another said: “Given her youth education role with TIE, it is not appropriate to be promoting S&M.”

And Megara 35!!!: She recently set up a sex workers’ branch of the GMB in Glasgow, allowing prostitutes to join a union for the first time. Her Mistress Megara Furie website promises “endorphic exhilaration and absolute submission”.(https://twitter.com/rhiannonv/status/1114510091431161856?lang=en-gb)

Feb 2019: Joan McAlpine is an unlikely rebel against the Scottish political establishment. The SNP MSP is chair of Holyrood’s culture and external affairs committee and a former parliamentary aide to Alex Salmond. She is gender-critical, or, in the prosecutorial terms of her detractors, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF).

Recently she began asking awkward questions about the campaign to give the force of law to relatively new and largely untested theories about sex, gender and identity only to be denounced by SNP councillor Rhiannon Spear, chair of the LGBT education lobby, TIE who accused her of “stoking a fire” and “wilfully ignoring the advice of service providers who have been working in the industry for decades”.

It is not the first time Joan has fallen foul of the SNP gendarmerie who police the views of feminists and other gender dissenters. In February, her committee recommended that the sex question in the Scottish census “should remain binary” and posted a Twitter thread outlining their concerns, which were:

Including a “non-binary” option risked devaluing the data on a protected characteristic (sex) under the Equality Act. They also wondered why so many women’s groups, especially those in receipt of taxpayers’ money, had dogmatically adopted the transgender ideology while failing to represent women who disagreed.

This prompted an extraordinary 1,400-word open letter in which some of Scotland’s leading third-sector groups took her to task over the Twitter thread. Signatories to the statement, which rebuked her for “sharing an inaccurate, partial, and negative assessment” of their work, included Close the Gap (which received £205,000 from the Scottish Government in 2018/19), Engender Scotland (£225,350) and Equate Scotland (£331,019).

Even in the unforgiving world of Scottish politics, the backlash against Joan was vicious. She told the press: “They try to shut you up by labelling you and othering you, by using extremist language. This isn’t just about trans people’s rights; they have the same human rights as everyone else and extra protections in the Equality Act and hate legislation, and that’s quite rightly so. This is about women’s rights and how the changes being pushed for impact women.”

Joan may be a Nationalist bomb-thrower but on gender, she has been moderate and measured. No one sincerely interested in a debate can credibly dismiss her thoughtful interventions or her temperate tone, including on proposals to amend the Gender Recognition Act to abandon medically-supported gender recognition certificates in favour of self-identification.

For the most part, Joan’s campaign has been a lonely one. Other MSPs agree but have hitherto been reluctant to invite controversy. No wonder. Only a few days before, the contents of private messages between three female SNP MSPs were leaked, exposing them as critics of Nicola Sturgeon’s breathless enthusiasm for the trans agenda.

The backlash served as a warning to other women not to step out of line if they don’t want their political careers jeopardised. The trans movement has co-opted the gay and lesbian struggle to convince doubters they are on “the wrong side of history”.

The tactic is a parallel of their ideology’s efforts to conflate sex and gender but the two are not the same. Maleness or femaleness is a fact of biology while masculine or feminine identity is the product of social conditioning and performance. Sex is data, gender is narrative. (https://twitter.com/JoanMcAlpine/status/1101251118611525633)

Aug 2020: Councillor Rhiannon Spear to spearhead the new SNP women’s mentoring programme: In a statement, she said, “Women make up over half of the population in Scotland but only 35% of those elected to the Scottish Parliament. That needs to change. Women are impacted by every decision that is taken in any parliament or local authority in Scotland. To allow decisions to have the best outcome for women our elected members should be representative of the communities they represent and made up of as many diverse voices as possible. So in order to encourage more women to stand the SNP has put in place measures that will remove the barriers that women face when they stand for election. Starting now any woman thinking of standing will be supported through the candidate self-assessment process through the SNP Women’s Mentoring Project. The project that I am leading is specifically for women who are interested in standing in the Local Government Election in 2022. The aim is that by the end of the project they will be confident enough to successfully stand to be selected and elected.”

Apr 2021: The Equality Network: Is a government-funded lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) equality and human rights charity. Its influence over SNP policies and many areas of Scottish society is absolute. Political Party’s will be expected to conform to the LGBTI agenda or face oblivion at the ballot box.

But the electorate may not subscribe to the changes without consultation of which there has been very little, to date. People are afraid of change and this might well be reflected in the way in which they cast their votes in the council elections in May 2022. In response to the possibility of dissent the commitment of political parties in Scotland to social and changes in the laws of Scotland, their network is being monitored so that conformity can be maintained.