Wings Over Scotland

Truth matters in public life.

So we’ve sent the letter below to the Scottish Parliament this morning.

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We’ve just submitted this Freedom Of Information request to Police Scotland:

I seek the following information with regard to Police Scotland’s programme of materials surrounding the implementation of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021:

(1) What was the total cost of the “Hate Monster” campaign?

(2) Of that, how much was spent on the production of the “Have you met the Hate Monster?” video (below)?

(3) Which pronouns should be used when referring to the Hate Monster in reporting of the campaign? Does the Hate Monster have a sex and/or gender? Were any full-body images of the Hate Monster commissioned, or only its upper body? If the former, please supply any such images held by Police Scotland.

(4) Would the reference on this page to “young men aged 18-30 […] with ideas about white-male entitlement” constitute a possible hate crime or hate incident, under the protected characteristic of race, since it seems likely to stir up hatred of young white men as being disproportionately bigoted and violent on the basis of their colour and lead to their victimisation?

(5) If so, is there a particular third party (such as a sex shop or mushroom farm) to whom this crime/incident should be reported, as when the alleged offender was the police a person might for obvious reasons not “feel comfortable reporting the incident to the police”, as noted on the campaign website?

(6) Which organisations, if any, were employed to provide suitable training to the staff of Third Party Reporting Centres and how much, if anything, were they paid?

(7) Are Third Party Reporting Centres required to accept any report, or can they use their discretion to refuse some reports if they find them objectionable or offensive?

(8) Are there circumstances whereby a report of a hate crime/hate incident could itself constitute a hate crime/hate incident?

Rev. Stuart Campbell
Editor
Wings Over Scotland

We’ll keep you updated with developments as they occur.

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Someone tweeted this today:

We were curious to find out what we’d said, but it seems to have been expunged from The National’s website. We eventually managed to track the email down in our vaults, though, so just as a bit of a change, here it is, as a reminder of a different time.

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When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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I first joined this union in roughly 1992. On the very few occasions that I’ve sought its assistance it’s been worse than useless, but I’ve retained membership for most of the period because I believe in the principle of trade unions.

However, there are limits, and they’ve just been breached.

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This is definitely fine and not at all suspicious.

Geoff Aberdein is the man whose evidence could destroy the First Minister. We know he’s already told the High Court under oath that he had a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon on 29 March 2018 to discuss the Salmond affair.

Sturgeon claims otherwise, saying he just popped in for a friendly hello while seeing someone else, and that the meeting – which the Scottish Government had repeatedly denied ever happened at all, until it suddenly changed its mind and admitted it last August – was so inconsequential that she forgot about it entirely for almost a year, which is why she’d told Parliament in January 2019 that it didn’t exist.

Which of those accounts is correct will determine whether the First Minister was lying to Parliament deliberately and whether she has to resign under the Ministerial Code.

But now, not only will Aberdein – the single most important figure in the entire inquiry – NOT be called as a witness, but the public will not be allowed to see even a redacted version of his written testimony so that they can judge who’s telling the truth.

What conceivable reason could there be for that? How could either “The meeting was arranged in advance and we talked about the allegations” or “I was in visiting someone else and just popped my head round the door briefly to say hi” ever need to be a state secret the Scottish public mustn’t know? And yet it is.

No cover-up here, folks. All open and transparent and above board. There’s definitely nothing going on that the Scottish Government desperately wants to hide from you. It’s all fine. Ssssshhhh, now. Sssshhhh for Nicola like good little boys and girls. Write another of your nice wee blogs about how Boris Johnson will just give in for no reason and independence is inevitable. But no questions. Definitely no questions.

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TO: Douglas Chapman MP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 8 January 2021
Also sent by email

Dear Douglas,

Congratulations on your recent election as the SNP’s treasurer. You may or may not be aware that in October 2020 this site asked your predecessor in the role, Colin Beattie, some questions on the subject of the supposedly “ring-fenced” indyref fighting fund that was created by donations to two separate fundraisers in previous years – referred to collectively by the party as the Referendum Appeal Fund or RAF.

We did so on behalf of numerous SNP members and non-members who had donated to the two appeals and were concerned as to the whereabouts of the monies.

No meaningful reply was received either by Wings or several individual donors who also contacted Mr Beattie asking the same questions, and a number of those people (as well as some of your elected colleagues) have asked us to put the same questions to you publicly, now that you’ve had a few weeks to settle into your new position and are understood to be interested in finding the answers.

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We’ve now filed a formal complaint with the Scottish Information Commissioner about this, because what we’d forgotten last week was that our original request was actually sent in September and it’s now been almost 60 working days with no sign of a proper response, not the 20 it’s supposed to take.

Because for some reason the Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t want you to know what the First Minister and Geoff Aberdein talked about in March 2018, and we think that you probably should.

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TO: Colin Beattie MSP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 28 October 2020

Dear Colin,

I note that today you’ve sent an email to SNP members on the contentious topic of the party’s supposedly “ring-fenced” referendum campaign fund, which we’ve learned for the first time today has a grand official name – the Referendum Appeal Fund (which from here on we’ll call the RAF for short).

The email also contains some rather offensive implied smears about my website and myself, but I’m quite used to being abused on the internet so I’ll let that slide. As we’re both on the side of Scottish independence, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match I thought I’d try to reach a constructive consensus.

I notice that in your email you invite people who have “any questions” on the subject to contact you without hesitation, and while I’m not a member of the party I believe I do speak for a considerable number of people who are, so it would likely also save you a lot of tedious copy-and-pasting if you replied publicly to me as their representative.

(And because, y’know, if you don’t then you’ll probably get about a thousand individual emails from members containing the text below anyway, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time.)

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Just two days ago the Electoral Commission gave us a fourth supposed date for the publication of the SNP’s 2019 accounts: having first been due out in early August, they then told us to expect them in early September, and then last week, and then in “the next three weeks”, ie the middle of October.

But someone gave us a tipoff that we might be able to request them via Freedom Of Information, since ostensibly the only holdup was that the EC wanted to wait until ALL of the main parties’ accounts were ready and publish them all at once for tidiness.

So we sent one in, and we just got a very quick reply.

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We’ve just sent a Freedom Of Information request to the Scottish Government.

You can read it below.

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