Wings Over Scotland

Oh no, someone’s let Ian Murray say words again.

There’s only one small problem with that complaint.

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We’re STILL officially on holiday, readers, and that means that for the last four months we’ve barely watched the news or looked at a newspaper, because who wants to be depressed by being lied to by a never-ending parade of scumbags when they’re on holiday? Not us, and we’ll tell you that for nothing.

So we’re grateful to alert readers who still point us to stuff like this.

EIGHT YEARS since Scottish Labour got into bed with the Tories to ensure the Tories kept ruling Scotland, and they still haven’t grasped why they don’t get the “protect us from the Tories” vote any more. Honestly, folks, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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Some in the independence movement got quite excited yesterday about a widely-reported poll showing that 63% of Scots want a new indyref in the next five years. It reminded us that we’d had a question on the subject in our own Panelbase poll earlier this month that we hadn’t got around to talking about.

Because of what we wanted to find out, that question was asked in a slightly strange way, so let’s quickly explain.

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Our ongoing quest to discover just who is actually willing to take responsibility for the actions of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond and its aftermath took another diversion yesterday when we received a reply from HM Inspectorate of Prosecutions in Scotland.

It had sounded like a promising lead. After all, HMIPS’ apparent purpose is to “inspect the operation” of COPFS, “improve the way COPFS serves the public” and “make COPFS more accountable”, all of which are exactly what we were after.

Sadly we had another disappointment in store.

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We’ve just learned that we’ve lost the appeal over our defamation by the then-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, when she repeatedly and publicly made the appalling, damaging and wholly untrue smear that I was a homophobe, even though the appeal judges all agreed with the original sheriff that the smear was false and defamatory.

But when it comes to deciding the verdict in a defamation case, it seems that the fact that absolutely everyone agrees I was definitely defamed is, to borrow a phrase from later in the judgement,“of no materiality”.

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We’ve received a response from the Scottish Government to our follow-up letter of last week regarding the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. It’s attached below.

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When the news isn’t news:

Lots of Scottish newspapers (most notably everything in the Herald And Times Group) had already ducked out of providing ABC figures at all, but this will be a godsend for the rest to save their growing embarrassment.

Wings readers can remember the pitiful state of the last published figures here.

With commendable swiftness, we’ve received a reply to our letter of earlier this week to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice. You can read it in full below (click to enlarge).

Sadly, however, it’s precisely the sort of evasion we expected, and it is not acceptable.

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We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.

Which is just two months after this happened:

So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.

As we still haven’t received any response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we sent this letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice today. Some passages have been redacted in accordance with contempt-of-court law.

We hope he’s listening.

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In a shock finding that’s sure to provoke soul-searching and recriminations at SNP HQ, it appears that the Scottish Government actually has a new policy that’s backed by a majority of the Scottish public.

Honestly, we were as surprised as you.

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