Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will know that for the past 15 months Wings has been investigating the apparent disappearance of almost £600,000 raised from supporters of independence (not just SNP voters) by the SNP in two fundraising campaigns in 2017 and 2019.

The money was supposedly to be “ring-fenced” for spending ONLY in a future indyref, and the party gave explicit and hotly-stated guarantees at the time of the first appeal that the money would definitely NOT be spent on party business.

But when the party’s 2019 accounts were published they showed that the SNP had less than £100,000 in the bank at the end of that year, and total net assets of less than £272,000. The £600,000 from the fundraisers was nowhere to be found, and the then-party treasurer’s feeble insistence that it was “woven through” the accounts in some unspecified way satisfied only the most gullible.

This week Wings Over Scotland has been told that the matter is now officially under investigation by the police.

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Even not-very-alert readers will have noticed that we’re taking a little summer holiday in the complete absence of any political events. Rest assured that we’re using the time to patrol Bath diligently for bears. But we couldn’t help noticing this on Twitter today.

Someone tweeted it to show that as late as summer 2020 the SNP was still soliciting money for what it called its “ring fenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund”.

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The pause button has been released. The day is finally here.

And it’s one that EVERY supporter of independence should rejoice in.

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We know the meanings of words are very flexible these days, especially in the SNP.

But this isn’t our understanding of the term “turning around”:

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Almost every day is now a new crisis for the SNP.

But it better get used to it.

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So let’s just recap where we are with this.

Because it really doesn’t look very good.

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Until a few weeks ago Calum Steele was the chief of the Scottish Police Federation, so as due-credits go we particularly appreciate this one.

So let’s remind ourselves of a few things.

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The entire mainstream Scottish media has picked up this afternoon on our intriguing scoop from yesterday about Peter Murrell lending the SNP £108,000 last year.

(The official SNP line is that it was for “cash flow reasons after the 2021 election”, although that doesn’t explain why less than half the money has been paid back more than 18 months later. Surely the party’s had enough cash flowing back in since then?)

And it’s enlightening to see how Scotland’s “proper” journalists handle such things.

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The SNP love to indignantly tell everyone how healthy the party’s finances are these days, especially in response to impertinent queries about the infamous “ring-fenced” £600,000 for a second indyref that everyone now knows isn’t going to happen.

(We still await an update from Police Scotland on what has now been an 18-month formal investigation into the matter, on top of the 18 months that had already elapsed since Wings first broke the story. We imagine they’re very busy investigating the runaway epidemic of misgenderings and feminists putting ribbons on stuff.)

It rakes in £2.5m a year from membership fees as well as millions from the UK government, and only has to pay for about 20 staff and a modest office in Edinburgh. So why is it having to borrow almost £108,000 from its own chief executive?

(Click pic to enlarge.)

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We’re still retired, but this just can’t go unremarked.

This is absolute banana-republic stuff. Even before you get into any of the specifics of the case, it’s simply not the Crown Office’s job to interfere with a police investigation by telling them who they may and may not interview under caution.

Scottish justice is extremely seriously compromised.

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15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more 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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