Wings Over Scotland

No explanation is given for why “writer at large” Neil Mackay has suddenly conducted a “wide-ranging, exclusive interview” with “one of Britain’s most senior spy chiefs” for today’s Herald On Sunday.

As far as we’re aware absolutely nothing has happened in respect of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent” to make the subject topical. Maybe Mackay just coincidentally bumped into Sir David Omand down the pub or something.

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We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.

So here’s this week’s.

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We have to admit the line below takes some chutzpah to even attempt. It’s a little bit like Harold Shipman refusing to admit to all the murders he committed on the grounds that revealing the victim/patients’ personal data would break the Hippocratic Oath.

We know, for an absolute and uncontested fact, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, that the First Minister has already committed the most serious breach of the Ministerial Code possible – lying to Parliament (section 1.3c). She lied about the date she first knew of the allegations against Salmond.

From the First Minister’s own personal written testimony, we know that the reason she lied to Parliament was that she had definitely also committed another breach of the Code, either by using Scottish Parliament premises for party matters (section 1.3i) or by failing to record government business discussed therein (sections 4.22, 4.23).

So it seems a bit late to be getting all bashful about the Code now.

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Lavish expenses recipient Pete Wishart MP doesn’t want to talk about Wings.

So that’s probably the end of that.

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Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.

Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.

The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.

These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).

Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.

(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)

We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.

So, Joe Biden promised to erase women as a legal concept if he got elected, and then by a quite remarkable coincidence there was a small but possibly crucial swing among women of all colours and ages towards a President who boasts of “grabbing them by the pussy” and may well overturn Roe vs Wade (and more) if he wins again.

Who could ever have foreseen, etc?

(It’s also passingly ironic that if Biden does win – as he still may well do arithmetically, although we wouldn’t necessarily want to put a lot of money on him living long enough to ever actually reach the Oval Office after all the legal wrangling/civil war is over – it’ll be on the votes of white men overturning those of women and people of colour, who all counter-intuitively and inexplicably swung to Trump.)

In a world where almost every vote seems to be on a knife-edge, it seems the woke left still hasn’t learned how criminally, recklessly, suicidally stupid it is to alienate 70% of the population to feed the endless, insatiable narcissism of 0.7% of the population.

Quite aside from anything else, that’s because the only votes you secure by doing so are the votes of people who’d never have voted for Donald Trump in a million years anyway. The only votes you’re gambling with are those of the natural left. And even if only a tiny fraction of the alienated actually turn, it can be enough to change the world.

When we first saw this video on Twitter through bleary half-asleep eyes this morning, we thought it was a well-done satire. But no. He actually put it out himself.

There can surely in history have never been anything that demeaned both the office of President and the USA as a nation more than the image halfway through that video of him prancing around in front of Air Force One.

Today America decides its future. And dear lord, what a choice it has.

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In today’s Sunday National:

Well, that’s good to know. Which members exactly?

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It’s important not to understate the magnitude of the chance we’re missing.

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The SNP’s message to you:

What they mean:

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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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It was my birthday yesterday, readers. (Late presents still accepted. The cheapest one is fine.) I got taken out to lunch and there was someone’s new kitten to play with, but mostly what flooded in wasn’t birthday cards but new scandal about the SNP.

It’s hard to know where to even start tackling the avalanche of new information. There were extraordinary revelations from the Salmond inquiry. There were other shocking revelations about the investigation. There was Alex Salmond’s request for the separate independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon to determine whether she lied to Parliament (which it should have been doing in the first place).

We’ll get to all that stuff in due course. But because there’s nothing like a good delve through some data, we’ll kick off with the SNP accounts.

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