Wings Over Scotland

Apologies for the slightly shonky quality of this video, readers, which is due to the fact that ITV are such monumental self-sabotaging clowns that it’s not actually possible to screencap any sort of digital broadcast of theirs – screw YOU, viral content! – so we had to do this by videoing our iPad with our iPhone.

Ouch. And speaking of monumental self-sabotaging clowns, Scottish Labour.

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Last Friday’s edition of The National ran this guff:

And as we often are, we were put in mind of the greatest politics book ever written.

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It’s now more than three years since this site drew attention to the curious case of Progress Scotland, the zombie “polling company” run by the SNP’s Angus Robertson that had no employees and hadn’t published any polls since October 2020, but was apparently still accepting, and soliciting, donations from subscribers, and appeared to have disposed of a rather substantial amount of money (well into six figures) without producing anything to show for it.

We followed up the next day with another article about the company’s repeated delays in producing its 2021 accounts, which finally showed up in May 2023.

Here’s what the Progress Scotland website looks like today.

And once more, a few questions spring to mind.

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Before we start, let’s note that this took 37 days.

As you’re about to read, it says almost nothing other than “Please go away now”.

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Today’s Sunday Mail leads for the second weekend in a row on questions about the finances of Yes Scotland.

But there’s a paragraph in the online version of the story that doesn’t make the print edition, and it’s a shame, because it’s a very telling one.

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Looks like we turned that round pretty fast, gang. Six weeks ago:

And today:

Amazing what a draft document and a KC opinion can do, eh? A casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the SNP was absolutely cold-sweat desperate to avoid a civil case that would set a powerful precedent for a legal prosecution.

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Wings has this evening received a formal legal opinion from Roddy Dunlop KC with regard to the prospects of success of a claim of fraudulent breach of trust by the SNP against donors to the “ringfenced” referendum campaign fundraisers.

We attach it below. We continue to seek more people to join the group – if you donated and aren’t happy that your money was misappropriated, please drop us a line via the confidential Wings contact form. If you’ve already done so, thank you, and stand by to hear from us shortly.

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We’ve had TWO emails from the Crown Office already this week, neither of which says anything except “Please hold”.

We’ve added them to our “in due course” collection, also featuring Police Scotland.

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Here’s a passage from Crown Agent John Logue’s recent BBC interview in which he described the crime for which Peter Murrell was just sentenced to five years and three months in prison. You’ll note that we’ve highlighted a few words and phrases in red.

JOHN LOGUE: I think the best way I can describe it is in some ways this case was no different from embezzlement that people might recognize in their daily lives. If people are a member of a church or a bowling club or a golf club, if someone in that organization has access to money on behalf of the society or the club and takes it and spends it in the local shops, that’s embezzlement.

And in some ways this case was as simple as that because what we were able to prove after the police investigation and after our investigation was that that was what Peter Murrell had done here. He had access to and control of party funds and he used it for his own purposes and that’s the crime of embezzlement. 

And now let’s just swap out those words for some very similar ones.

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We have received a further reply from the Crown Office.

Alert readers may note that while Wings has repeatedly noted that the misappropriation of the fundraiser money by the SNP could constitute either fraud OR embezzlement (or both), entirely separate to the embezzlement FROM the SNP by Peter Murrell, the Crown Office continues – as its agent John Logue did in a recent BBC interview – to address only the possibility of fraud, which would be by far the more difficult of the two to prove, and to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that no less a personage than the First Minister has already admitted to spending all of the money on a purpose other than that which it was raised for.

The response is therefore plainly unsatisfactory, which we will deal with in our own reply within the next 24 hours, which will again be drafted by counsel. We will of course publish it here once it’s sent, so stay tuned.

For any of you who haven’t caught it yet, my interview from Monday’s BBC Scotcast (which is also available on Spotify).

Sadly due to a summer scheduling quirk the video version won’t go out on the telly, and seemingly not on the BBC YouTube page either, so you’ll just have to listen to the audio and somehow live without seeing my gorgeous face.

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I’ve just recorded an episode of the BBC ScotCast podcast, which should “drop”, as we say in the media biz, around teatime tonight. It focused largely on issues around Operation Branchform, and the fact that only one of the two crimes it concerned has been resolved.

Time always flies when you’re having fun, so I ended up not being able to fit in half the stuff I wanted to say in the 40 minutes I chatted with Martin Geissler (which will likely shrink to fit into the 30-minute broadcast slot by the time they’ve edited all the most libellous bits out).

And one of those things was the bewildering fact that the investigation into the SNP’s finances went on for two years before the police stumbled into the second crime, and the only one that’s actually concluded – Peter Murrell’s embezzlement from the SNP. Because the first crime ought to have been all  but done and dusted in 24 hours max.

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