Wings Over Scotland

On Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told Laura Kuenssberg that the SNP’s accounts “went up and down” as her excuse for not noticing that hundreds of thousands of pounds had suddenly vanished from them overnight.

Several things leap out immediately from that clip.

One, there absolutely very much WAS “something glaringly suspicious in the accounts that I should have seen” – the party she led had raised almost £700,000 in two “ring-fenced” fundraisers that wasn’t there any more, which ought to have made its leader at least mildly curious.

And two, attempting to fob responsibility off onto the independent auditors simply won’t wash. It’s not their job to determine whether the SNP has kept its political promises or not, their job is simply to match up money coming in against money going out and produce a set of numbers to show what it all adds up to. It makes no odds to them if it was spent on a party conference, a fancy motorhome or a 50-foot golden statue of Danny La Rue. All they can see is numbers.

(In any event the party’s longstanding auditors resigned in 2023 rather than risk being caught up in any more dodginess. It took months for the SNP to find anyone else willing to take the job on.)

But even leaving those things aside, if we’re going to learn anything about how The Great Indyref Swindle got to this calamitous point unchecked we need to examine just how hard Nicola Sturgeon had to look the other way to fail to see what was going on literally under her nose and literally in her own back yard.

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To tell you the truth, readers, we’re suffering from a little bit of option paralysis at the moment, although happily not in the same way Peter Murrell is.

The endless torrent of revelations following on from Murrell’s conviction a week ago isn’t just fascinating in its own right – it also forces numerous historical issues to be seen in a new light. At any given second there are half-a-dozen different articles we could be writing, but also so many to read that it’s hard to find the time.

We suspect this matter is going to run and run all through the summer silly season because there are simply so many angles and so many unanswered questions.

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Sadly, this turned out to be prescient this morning.

Laura Kuenssberg did give Nicola Sturgeon an uncomfortable time in their interview on her Sunday programme on BBC News, but when confronted with the one gaping open goal that Sturgeon has no answer for – and even when Sturgeon TWICE set it up on a plate for her – Kuenssberg failed to knock the ball into the empty net.

That doesn’t – by some distance – mean there was nothing of interest to note, though, so let’s take a walk through (the first instalment of) what was said.

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We’ll be honest with you, readers, if we were in a situation where a lawyer was issuing statements for us, this isn’t what we’d want to hear.

“If my client had been charged, she’d be in prison right now” is a worrying distance short of a vote of confidence in your client’s innocence.

But the statement Aamer Anwar put out for Nicola Sturgeon last night – her FOURTH in 48 hours, despite saying on Monday morning that she’d be making no further comment on the Peter Murrell case – had rather more wrong with it than even that.

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So, having made a statement on Monday morning which asserted that she wouldn’t make any further statements, then making another statement on Monday afternoon, Nicola Sturgeon and her solicitor issued a third statement in 36 hours last night.

And while we acknowledge that this is a very high bar to clear, it contained one of the most troubling and blatant lies she’s ever told.

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Peter Murrell wasn’t even locked up in his cell at Saughton (we hope it’s the same one as Craig Murray’s) when the chump-suckering resumed.

And as the Nicola Sturgeon Loyal, led by her most faithful of lieutenants, set out to try to take control of the post-conviction narrative, let’s take a look at just what a boatload of bare-faced bullshit the above is.

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Despite what you or we might think, in the eyes of the Scottish Football Association this ISN’T a pitch invasion. This is simply what a football match in progress looks like.

Because according to the absolutely extraordinary statement they’ve released this evening, that was game time. The clock was still running, nothing was being added to account for the fact that there were thousands of thugs rampaging across the field, and the game was still happening in that moment, until it was ended four seconds later.

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We were excited to discover this old footage of a very young John Swinney.

How thrilled he must be that he’s managed to make his dream come true.

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Looks like this, apparently.

The image below is a graph illustrating how many seats each party won in last week’s supposedly “proportional” Scottish Parliament election, compared to how many they would have won if the electoral system had been actually proportional.

The SNP and Greens are now over-represented by 37% and 50% respectively, while the Unionist parties are all under-represented compared to their vote share by (left to right) 26%, 19%, 20% and 23%.

The Additional Member System has failed very badly at its job, from either perspective. “Pro-indy” parties have 73 seats (57%) rather than the 52 seats that their 40.8% vote share should have earned, while Unionist parties have 56 seats (or 43%) when they should have 69 for their 56% of the vote.

(The other 4% of the vote was scattered among 24 other parties or independents, with 1.8% going to identifiably pro-independence candidates, increasing the total “pro-indy” vote to 42.6%, fully 10 points short of current polling for independence itself.)

It is, therefore, a little bit of a stretch – to put it mildly – to present the refusal of the UK government to grant a second independence referendum on the basis of the results as an outrage against “democracy”. Indeed, if any outrage against democracy has taken place, it happened last Thursday.

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Anyone seeking to make a compelling argument for the proposition that Scotland’s politicians and lawmakers are simply too farcically incompetent to ever be trusted with running an independent country had a gift-wrapped Godsend delivered to them last week by the idiot student children of Edinburgh.

But we can’t really put the blame on the colourfully-haired, keffiyeh-clad cretin kiddies of the capital for that, because it’s their elders and betters who opened the door.

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Well, we told you so. We told you in March (and indeed long before then) that the 2026 Holyrood election was a giant waste of time and money that would deliver exactly the same useless Parliament we already had, and so it proved.

The SNP ended up giving half-a-dozen seats to the Greens, Labour donated a handful to the Lib Dems, the Tories split into two parties with 29 seats instead of a single party with 31 and that’s about it. The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems stayed first, fourth and last, while the right-wing split let Labour creep from 3rd to joint 2nd despite losing seats.

A pro-indy tally of 72 became a pro-indy tally of 73, big whoop, and almost every SNP list vote elected Unionists instead, just as we told you for almost a year it would do.

We also told you that the only place there was even a chance of an SNP list seat was in the Highland region, where they did indeed sneak one at the very death of play, only because they’d somehow pulled off the incredible feat of losing Kate Forbes’ old seat of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch on a huge 21% swing, despite having started with a 15,000 majority in a seat where only 39,000 people voted.

So there we are.

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