If you subscribe to the theory that it’s better to fight 100 duck-sized horses than a single horse-sized duck, the SNP is knocking it out of the park today.
Because the papers just can’t make their minds up about the biggest story with which to attack John Swinney’s beleaguered party.
You’ve had a few pretty gruelling pieces to get through in the last week or so, readers, so here’s something a little more light-hearted.
It’s from an episode of Broadcasting Scotland on 27 November 2020, a month after we confirmed our big story about the SNP accounts and the missing fundraiser money. In it, snug-toed SNP MP Pete Wishart opines that there really is nothing to worry about, and we should all just put our trust in the party.
We’ll leave you to judge whose opinion stood the test of time.
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.
Now that Nicola Sturgeon is finally free of her gruelling MSP workload, which could give her anything up to two extra hours of spare time a week, she might like to start making a proper dent in the contents of her fully-loaded bookshelves.
(At least until they’re seized and sold under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.)
So we thought we’d offer up a few suggestions.
The multi-statement meltdown that has been the unravelling of Nicola Sturgeon this week has been quite something to behold. Last night, for example, we swear our Twitter feed presented these two tweets one after the other.
But then we read something even more extraordinary.
Read the rest of this entry →
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.
So there it is. We did tell you so.
There will be no trial, no cross-examination, no explanation. The people of Scotland, the members and supporters of the SNP, the wider Yes movement, none of us will ever know what really happened. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
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.
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.
This game of football is not over.
Except for viewers in Scotland, where no laws apply.
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.
We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.
To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
