It’s probably past time that we put this all in one post for easy reference.
Herald journalists with no idea what a story is, start here.
Hindsight is 20/20, readers, but perhaps we ought to have paid a little more attention to the article below back in 2015.
Because as the old saying goes: when people tell you who they are, believe them.
At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.
Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.
This is an utterly extraordinary tweet.
The three people who were asking to see the SNP’s books weren’t Sean Clerkin, they were MEMBERS OF THE SNP’S FINANCE & AUDIT COMMITTEE. That is, they were people whose actual literal job is to monitor the SNP’s finances, and who are all drawn from the membership of the SNP.
So what Hunter is saying there is that the SNP chose three of its own members to serve on its own finance committee, yet they could not be allowed to carry out their duties because their loyalties did not lie with the party.
In which case, a reasonable observer might very well ask, what sort of stupendously, farcically incompetent organisation puts such people in such positions?
Fresh from being embarrassed over a ridiculous smear story this week about someone complaining to the police about the use of a well-known political phrase by a Wings commenter, Tom Gordon of the Herald went on quite the attack yesterday.
The thread, which contains a number of basic factual errors about events*, continued for several more tweets all generally rubbishing our scoop from Friday afternoon and suggesting that no proper journalist (“the rest of us”) would have run the story.
So he must be feeling quite left out this morning.
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.
We’re currently busy pursuing a rather larger story, readers, but to keep you amused in the meantime we thought we’d share this absolute belter from Wings contributor Angus MacNeil MP today in The National:
Deftly put. Now back to work with us.
Yes Pete, we did check.
What happened was that there wasn’t a second indyref. And that’s how we know that leaving it to the SNP alone doesn’t work.
Please vote Alba, readers, or we’ll see you here again in another five years.
While we were out this afternoon diligently patrolling for bears in the 20C beauty of a Bath early spring (largely because there’s a rather implausible 40% chance of snow forecast for next Wednesday), an email flooded in from Tom Gordon of the Herald.
“Hello Stuart. We’ve been contacted by a reader who says he also contacted you about a post on the website in the early hours of Saturday. Referring to Nicola Sturgeon, the poster says “Decapitating this witch would stop the SNP dead in their tracks.”
Our reader, Ian Reid, an SNP activist in the Borders, has been a regular Wings reader but was taken aback by the language. He had hoped you would have deleted the post, but that hasn’t happened.
He has reported it to the police and given a statement to them.
He has also given us these comments on why the Alba Party should condemn this sort of material and cut its ties to the Wings site.
“Alex Salmond and the leaders of the new party need to separate themselves from that, they need to call it out. They seem to be trying to set themselves up as the moral guardians for women’s rights, which I absolutely support. At the same time, we’ve got somebody posting this on a blog that they clearly associate with and clearly use.
On the one hand, they’re talking about gender-proofing their policies, which is great. On the other hand, they’ve got this where a woman is being described as the devil herself, and where there’s a reference to decapitating the witch having a justifiable end.
That needs to be called out. The party needs to come out and say something about it. The best possible outcome would be that they do condemn it. It would be such a powerful message. Separating themselves from that cesspit would be a very politically astute thing for them. As long as they don’t, it’s colluding with it, it’s condoning it.”
This is for a potential story online and in print.
Would you care to comment?”
And, y’know, of course we would.
There’s already opinion polling in the field regarding the Alba Party.
It’s hard to say how the party will do at such an early stage. But what we DO know is that it has a very low bar to clear – all it has to do is come out ahead of the Greens and/or the Lib Dems (ie probably score about 6%) to destroy any possible rationale for it not being included in election debates like the one the BBC is showing tonight.
It’s already getting hard to keep up with the string of well-kent faces and veteran indy campaigners leaving the SNP to join Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party.
It might be an idea to start maintaining a list.
There’s a lot of this going around from SNP and Unionists alike this weekend.
Because, as we may have mentioned before, they really do think you’re stupid.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
