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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Any time you’re not sure whether something that happens in Scottish politics is good or bad for the cause of independence, here’s a top tip for you: see how the enemies of independence feel about it.

“Running scared” would seem to be a fair, if understated, summary.

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Okay. So we hate the name and the first half hour of the online press conference was a complete shambles. But none of that matters.

There is now a pro-independence party with a serious chance of winning a significant number of seats that sane people who believe in science and women’s rights and civil liberties (and actually meaningfully pursuing independence rather than just using it as a carrot to generate pension contributions) can vote for.

Wings Over Scotland has never told its readers who to vote for. But what we can say is that if we lived in Scotland we would be voting for it without a moment’s hesitation. We don’t believe it’s at all an exaggeration to say it’s the last chance to save Scotland as a country that we’d want to live in if and when it finally does achieve its independence. A country worth winning.

If you feel the same, click the pic above.

Readers may wish to know that Alex Salmond will be making an announcement at 2pm today. You should be able to watch it live on Sky News and probably other news channels. We’ll give you any more details as we get them.

It’s now official that blogger and former diplomat Craig Murray has been found guilty on several charges of contempt of court (although also cleared of several others).

It is of course not for this site to question the judgement of Lady Dorrian (while noting that the verdict may well be subject to appeal and is therefore not yet final), although we do find some aspects of it somewhat troubling – particularly paragraph 74 in which the fate of a defendant appears to be held hostage to the speculative “imagination” of a hypothetical observer.

But it’s not the conviction (NB we are not lawyers and the strange civil/criminal hybrid that is the offence of contempt of court makes the correct terminology somewhat uncertain) of Craig Murray that’s the true cause for concern in this matter.

What’s alarming, as this site has noted previously, is the highly selective and partisan eye with which the Crown Office appears to be pursuing the offence.

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Today is going to be by some distance the quietest one in Scottish politics this week, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. Because while I just ignore unimaginably vast torrents of online abuse every hour of every day of every year, once in a blue moon some things get said that you just can’t let pass.

Paul Kavanagh made a lot of unpleasant personal-attack tweets yesterday off the back of an unpleasant personal-attack article on his blog, which I don’t propose to get into the many individual falsehoods and misrepresentations of here.

(While I believe his evidence in the Dugdale case actually did more harm than good, I don’t hold him responsible for that and I appreciated his willingness to try to help when others I’d considered friends had turned their back.)

But the comments above are too much to bear.

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