Wings Over Scotland

It doesn’t take a master analyst to see that the Salmond inquiry committee is running out of patience with the Scottish Government’s endless attempts to obstruct its work.

This afternoon it issued a statement, with obvious irritation, making clear that it did not wish to see documents the Scottish Government was trying to submit to it, which the committee had not asked for, and which had previously been struck down as unlawful by Lord Pentland in the initial judicial inquiry.

The Scottish Government’s only purpose in doing so was to try to put the details of the discredited and disproven-in-court allegations into the public domain with the intention of smearing Mr Salmond yet again, and the committee has made its displeasure with the plan clear, telling the Scottish Government to abandon its intended legal action to release the documents and get on with producing the ones the inquiry HAS asked for.

But there’s a little bit more to the story than that.

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We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.

It was quite the performance.

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A column on a Sturgeon-loyalist indy website that we read yesterday has been mildly annoying us ever since, and in the interests of open debate (but mainly because it’s cold and grey and rainy outside and we can’t go out and feed the swans) we thought it was worth taking half an hour to walk through it a little and explain just why it’s such a dangerous piece of fantasy nonsense.

But first here’s one of said swans. She’s about five months old and her adult feathers are just starting to come through. Isn’t she lovely?

In case things get a bit rough later we’ve got some squirrels and a really fat dachshund as emergency backup, so buckle in.

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The weekend just past saw a convulsion as big as any we can ever recall witnessing on Yes social media, triggered by a series of tweets by Nicola Sturgeon which caused an extraordinary negative reaction out of all proportion to their ostensible content.

The reason was that the First Minister – who had remained silent about countless episodes of hideous misogynistic abuse aimed from her own side at MPs and MSPs like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry – had chosen to suddenly leap into action in defence of the toxically divisive horror that is Glasgow councillor Rhiannon Spear after Spear had been widely criticised for making blatantly false claims in a video promoting her attempt to be selected as the candidate for Argyll & Bute.

(Sturgeon had no such public condemnation for the torrents of abuse the SNP Twitler Youth then unleased on Kirsten Thornton, the female SNP activist and Generation Yes founder who’d pointed out Spear’s untruths.)

The move sent the party’s woke and sane factions into a frenzy of bloodletting which in itself will have little if any impact on the wider electorate, but nonetheless threw into sharp relief the life-and-death battle currently going on for the SNP’s soul.

And since that’s related to what we’ve been writing about on Wings for the bulk of this year, it seemed worthwhile to get some things down on the record once and for all.

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Whichever side you’re on, it’s simply observably true that the Scottish Government is doing everything in its power to obstruct, delay and derail the Parliamentary inquiry into its ruinously botched investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond.

Any investigative journalist attempting to get to the bottom of the subject and find out what really happened is met with a wall of secrecy and misinformation while trying to navigate their way through the publicly-available information, and just to give you some idea of what it’s like, we’d like to offer you one tiny but typical example.

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Over the last year or so, this site’s commentary on matters surrounding the attempted imprisonment of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse has attracted a considerable amount of ire from a section of the readership, demanding “proof” of the involvement of the current First Minister.

Such proof has been impossible to provide for legal reasons. But it’s always been the case that the truth could only be suppressed for so long, and events in recent days have brought the first chinks of light through the wall of smoke and mirrors the Scottish Government has been attempting to surround the matter with.

So in our very lightest and softest shoes, let’s tiptoe through what is both a labyrinth and a minefield and see if we can make some of it a little easier to understand.

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The most recent insult handed down by the smirking, sneering Permanent Secretary To The Scottish Government to the people of Scotland, who she ostensibly works for and who pay her enormous salary (she gets more than either Nicola Sturgeon or Boris Johnson, and who knows, possibly even slightly more than Peter Murrell), is a crass and dismissive one even by her extraordinary standards.

The Woman Who Remembers Nothing, having asked for some time to think about it, concluded that there was simply no way to estimate the total cost to the public purse of the biased and unlawful fiasco she presided over regarding the investigation of false abuse claims against Alex Salmond, and which had cost taxpayers over half a million pounds in Mr Salmond’s legal fees alone.

Her argument was that because government employees are paid fixed salaries and don’t record how much of their time they spent on specific tasks, there was no way to estimate how much had been spent on the attempt to fit up the former First Minister.

But that isn’t how anything works these days, is it?

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There’s a good column by Kevin McKenna in today’s Herald On Sunday about Boris Johnson, from which this paragraph in particular jumped out at us.

It did so because of something else we’d just read this weekend.

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We’ve had another letter from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

And slowly, painfully, we’re starting to get at least some answers.

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Bad news, readers. We’ve done some research, and it’s our grave duty to report to you that according to the evidence we’ve discovered, there’s a high statistical probability that everyone reading this website will one day die.

Luckily there’s a solution: we can all just commit suicide right now.

Wait – that’s a stupid idea, right?

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Let’s be clear about something straight away – we’re NOT about to write an article in defence of Tony Abbott. He IS a sexist, a misogynist and a climate change denier (and a homophobe), and as far as we can ascertain he’s NOT actually all that good at trade either. So even though the bar for improving the competence of the UK government is astonishingly low, we don’t want him in it any more than anyone else does.

But this is still an incredibly brainless thing to say:

And it explains a lot about what’s gone wrong everywhere.

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Throughout the summer, the Scottish Government has been talking consistently about its goal being the “total elimination” of the coronavirus, and specifically contrasting that with England’s approach of merely “suppressing” it.

In the “framework for decision making” published in late April, the administration stated bluntly that “There is no such thing as a level of “acceptable loss”“ from the virus. But then yesterday something changed.

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