Wings Over Scotland

An ongoing exception to this site’s retirement is for news relating to the scandalous imprisonment of journalist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, the only human in the history of the planet Earth ever to be jailed for the barely-defined pseudo-crime of “jigsaw identification”.

We had another phone call from Craig in HMP Edinburgh yesterday, and he continues to be in good spirits and be well treated by both staff and fellow inmates. He expressed great gratitude for the flood of mail sent by Wings readers in response to our appeal a couple of weeks ago – he’s been receiving up to 60 letters, emails and packages a day, which have been very much appreciated in helping him pass the 22.5 hours out of every 24 that he spends locked alone in his cell.

The prison authorities, however, imposed some bizarre restrictions.

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Our cartoonist is still on holiday, but he’d never have beaten this for a joke anyway.

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Slacky The Holiday Boy is once again on his monthly two-week break, so it falls to us to try to amuse you on a Saturday morning with an image of some sort. Unfortunately very little funny is happening in Scottish politics, so all we’ve got is this.

Yes, the two most popular politics websites in Scotland at the moment are one that’s been retired for three months and one whose author is currently in prison. All hail that new media, eh?

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We had a phonecall this morning from HMP Edinburgh, asking us to briefly relapse our retirement again to put out a request on behalf of Prisoner 157095 – better known to you and us as our friend Craig Murray, the only person on the planet to now or ever have been imprisoned for the undefined and extremely selectively prosecuted pseudo-crime of “jigsaw identification”.

Craig is doing okay a week and a half into his eight-month sentence in Saughton and is being treated well by both staff and inmates, but was recently informed that he is not eligible for early release on an electronic tag (which might have seen him out by the end of next month) because he’s a civil prisoner rather than a criminal one.

Ironically, if he’d murdered, beaten or raped someone he WOULD have been eligible for early liberty under the scheme, but because he’s a frail elderly man in jail for a non-violent quasi-crime and represents no possible earthly menace to anyone, he’ll be locked up for months longer.

What Craig IS finding difficult is being locked up alone in a 12′-by-8′ cell for 22.5 hours a day with very little to do, and he would greatly appreciate if people could take a moment or two to write to him. Letters or cards can be sent by the traditional paper-and-pen method via this address:

157095 C Murray
G3/34 HM Prison Edinburgh
33 Stenhouse Road
Edinburgh
EH11 3LN

Alternatively you can email him via the officially-sanctioned Email A Prisoner service. This costs 40p per message, but Craig can reply and video chats are even possible (although sending photo attachments is NOT allowed at HMP Edinburgh).

Please find the time to do this if you can, readers. Don’t just think about it, actually do it, even if it’s just a card. It’s only a few minutes out of your day, but it would mean a lot to a man for who that time passes much more slowly.

We accidentally de-retired for a week last week because the outrage of Craig Murray’s imprisonment couldn’t be allowed to go unremarked. But we’re shutting back down again now, so here’s a fun challenge to occupy yourselves with in what’s left of what’s passed for the summer.

Because the feat described in that picture isn’t an easy one.

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For the avoidance of any doubt, this site does not believe that Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Leeona Dorrian, is corrupt.

It does not believe that she is acting at the behest of the Scottish Government or the First Minister, even though Lady Dorrian is known to wish to succeed Lord Carloway as the country’s most senior judge when he steps down in the near future and that position –  Lord President of the Court of Session – is in the First Minister’s gift.

What this site does believe is that she’s acting out of bias. Lady Dorrian is known to wish to dispense with juries in sexual-assault trials, and it’s our belief – based on observing her conduct during the trial of Craig Murray and her apparent emotional investment in the case – that that’s because she belongs to the sizeable group of people who fundamentally think that all acquittals in such cases are wrongful, and that in essence any man ever accused of rape or sexual assault is automatically guilty merely by dint of having been accused, on the grounds that no woman would ever lie about such a thing.

(Or more frighteningly, that a small minority of accusers DO lie but the false convictions or ruined lives of a few men are a price worth paying.)

Her actions, though – in jailing Craig Murray for eight months for a crime (so-called “jigsaw identification”) which is hopelessly ill-defined and for which nobody has ever been imprisoned before in all of world history – risk doing more to undermine the rights of women alleging sexual assault than any individual ever has before.

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All recorded indyref polling on the standard question, from here and here.

The picture (click to enlarge) tells the story more eloquently than we could.

Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.

Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.

It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.

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Wings has been informed this morning by a reliable source that Police Scotland have now progressed their inquiry into the SNP’s “missing” £600,000 fundraiser money from an “assessment” to a formal criminal investigation into the matter, which was first revealed on this site in January 2020. We understand that an official statement to that effect will be forthcoming shortly.

[EDIT 12.27pm: the statement is below.]

”Police Scotland has now received seven complaints in relation to donations that were made to the Scottish National Party.

“After assessment and consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we will now carry out an investigation.

“Enquiries are continuing and anyone who has any information which may assist with this investigation is asked to contact police.”

We look forward to the eventual outcome and continue our retirement in the meantime. Those still loyal to the party leadership wishing to be reassured that everything is fine and above board and the whole thing is a mad conspiracy theory and a total non-story are directed to Wee Ginger Dug and to the Twitter accounts of Pete Wishart, Mhairi Hunter, Tom Arthur, Stewart McDonald, Tom Gordon and David Leask, as usual.

Holiday Boy is still “resting”, so here’s a laugh from nearly six years ago.

Hear the bang? See the spark? No, us either.