On 8 December this site ran an article about the Chief Executive Officer of the Scottish National Party, Peter Murrell. It has recently been drawn to our attention that the piece contained a serious inaccuracy, which we would like to remedy.
Because as it turns out, Peter Murrell IS a liar.
For much of last year, this site advocated a rational but unpopular position – namely that the SNP, which at the time held the balance of power in the UK parliament, should offer to support Theresa May’s soft-Brexit deal in exchange for the transfer of powers to hold a second independence referendum.
The logic was clear – nothing was ever going to stop Brexit from happening, but passing May’s deal would save the UK from the catastrophe of a no-deal. Everyone would be a winner – England and Wales would get what they voted for, Remain-voting Northern Ireland would get special terms that kept it in the EU in all but name, and Scotland would get the chance to stay in the EU as an independent nation.
“But no!”, everyone screamed at us. “We can’t possibly do any sort of deal with the Tories or we’d be electorally crucified and lose the referendum, you idiots!”
Record scratch, jump-cut to the present day.
[Pause for long, weary sigh.]
The Scottish Parliament website has just published a letter from Peter Murrell following his appearance at the Salmond inquiry yesterday.
The media is focusing on Murrell’s continued evasion of the question of his WhatsApp usage (Murrell bizarrely states he has several messaging apps installed on his phone but uses none of them), but there’s a much more interesting revelation in the second of the letter’s two sections.
This is a direct, unambiguous and categorical statement from the First Minister that the investigation into the false allegations against Salmond was a Scottish Government matter that was absolutely nothing to do with the SNP.
Her failure to record the use of her private office at the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issue on 29 March 2018 (despite repeated denials that such a thing happened at all), and to take minutes of that discussion and of subsequent meetings at her home to consider the issue, and her numerous statements that the matter was private party business (now revealed by Murrell to be false) are all therefore indisputably breaches of the Ministerial Code.
The net draws ever tighter.
This site and other gender-critical voices are regularly accused of being “obsessed” with trans issues, even though the subject has been mentioned in fewer than 0.7% of Wings posts. But this week the SNP’s transgender faction – when it hasn’t been STILL raging about its battering in the NEC elections – has been swamping social media with organised complaints about a tiny prospective legislative change that they themselves insist doesn’t actually matter at all.
But wait a minute – that’s not true, is it?
We’ve now filed a formal complaint with the Scottish Information Commissioner about this, because what we’d forgotten last week was that our original request was actually sent in September and it’s now been almost 60 working days with no sign of a proper response, not the 20 it’s supposed to take.
Because for some reason the Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t want you to know what the First Minister and Geoff Aberdein talked about in March 2018, and we think that you probably should.
We got this email last night.
And, y’know, that’s really not good enough, folks.
Alert readers will recall the deranged open letter released by a group of transactivists last Friday, in a nakedly transparent attempt to influence the SNP’s NEC elections that weekend which backfired on them horribly (and amusingly) when the party’s members instead kicked out three-quarters of the committee’s woke faction and replaced them with feminists, socialists and above all advocates of actually achieving independence.
But things just got rather more interesting.
If you don’t have the time to read Alyn Smith’s astonishing response to the SNP NEC election results in today’s National, we’ve edited it down to 10 seconds for you.
If you’re in no rush, read on.
We had, we think it’s only fair to say, extremely low expectations of Nicola Sturgeon’s keynote speech this afternoon to the SNP’s soporific, strangled 2020 non-conference. It seems that members felt the same, because 15 seconds before the speech began only 1,166 of them were logged in to watch it.
The speech she just delivered, though, limboed under those expectations in platform shoes and a stovepipe hat without even grazing the underside of the bar.
In a post last month we referenced a ZX Spectrum computer game from 1984 called “Worse Things Happen At Sea”. Today as we watched the First Minister on the Andrew Marr Show, we were put in mind of another nautical-disaster-themed one from a great deal nearer to the end of the Speccy’s life.
It was grim viewing in every sense.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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