Wings Over Scotland

All one can hope is that this was an unfortunate slip of the tongue.

Otherwise, folks, you’ll just have to buck your ideas up.

We’ve just watched a hearing at the Court Of Session with regard to Alex Salmond’s civil claim against the Scottish Government. It was an ostensibly minor one, in which Salmond’s team were requesting a sist (pause) in the case for the fourth time, on the grounds of a number of ongoing police inquiries related to the events around the claim.

For most of the time Wings was the only journalist in a (virtual) room full of lawyers – although a couple of Scottish Daily Mail hacks turned up midway through – and we got to hear a dramatic surprise revelation.

James Hynd is a civil servant who was head of the Scottish Government’s cabinet, parliament and governance division during the inquiry.

(And he may still be – he’s a man with a microscopic digital footprint, and pretty much every piece of what little there is to be found concerns the inquiry. Indeed, the same is true of his entire department, which is extremely publicity-shy.)

But the hearing revealed for the first time that Hynd is currently subject to a criminal investigation by Police Scotland, with the name Operation Broadcroft, on suspicion of the serious crime of “wilfully making false statements on oath” to the inquiry.

And the ramifications of that extend much further than Mr Hynd himself.

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Poor old Tommy Sheppard’s got a contract, so he has to keep talking. And this week he said something that, if anyone really thought the constitution was still a current live political issue, would have attracted a lot more attention than it did.

Because even the SNP are now saying another indyref is – at best – a decade away.

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We were very pleased to discover this morning that Johnny Ball is still alive.

But even the man who managed to make maths fun for generations of children would be hard pushed to make sense of the SNP’s membership figures.

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In these grim times, at least we have funny animal videos to cheer us up.

Unfortunately when you write about politics for a living, everything is an analogy.

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These paragraphs are all from the same story.

The Hate Crime Act has rather faded into obscurity after the furore surrounding its introduction, with the police apparently just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist by ignoring thousands and thousands of complaints, and the useless Scottish commentariat duly proclaiming as a result that it was all just a big fuss about nothing.

But as soon as everyone stopped looking at it, there it was.

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In many ways, the fabricated, hysterical furore of Humza Yousaf Vs Elon Musk is the ultimate in summer-silly-season politics stories.

Absurdly plainly, the former First Minister ISN’T going to take any legal action against the billionaire owner of Twitter. He only likes bullying small nurseries, and even then he doesn’t follow through. He didn’t even sue us for calling him racist a few months ago, so there’s zero chance he’s going to square up to the world’s richest man.

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Exactly a decade ago today, on 11 August 2014, the Wee Blue Book was released.

This was where things stood at that moment in time.

One month after the WBB, that 20-point gap was down, like-for-like, to two points.

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As any moderately heavy internet user will tell you, it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have literally hundreds of browser tabs open at any one time.

Every now and again you’ll go to clean them up and find something that you’ve been meaning to write about in a quiet moment, and this certainly counts as a quiet moment in Scottish politics, so let’s do this one now.

Because the story above is from March, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone anywhere talk about just how weird it is, or what it tells us about the 2024 SNP.

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The prolific American sci-fi writer LE Modesitt once said, “Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.”

And the powers of tools lie in the hands of those who wield them.

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