Wings Over Scotland

Okay. So we hate the name and the first half hour of the online press conference was a complete shambles. But none of that matters.

There is now a pro-independence party with a serious chance of winning a significant number of seats that sane people who believe in science and women’s rights and civil liberties (and actually meaningfully pursuing independence rather than just using it as a carrot to generate pension contributions) can vote for.

Wings Over Scotland has never told its readers who to vote for. But what we can say is that if we lived in Scotland we would be voting for it without a moment’s hesitation. We don’t believe it’s at all an exaggeration to say it’s the last chance to save Scotland as a country that we’d want to live in if and when it finally does achieve its independence. A country worth winning.

If you feel the same, click the pic above.

It’s now official that blogger and former diplomat Craig Murray has been found guilty on several charges of contempt of court (although also cleared of several others).

It is of course not for this site to question the judgement of Lady Dorrian (while noting that the verdict may well be subject to appeal and is therefore not yet final), although we do find some aspects of it somewhat troubling – particularly paragraph 74 in which the fate of a defendant appears to be held hostage to the speculative “imagination” of a hypothetical observer.

But it’s not the conviction (NB we are not lawyers and the strange civil/criminal hybrid that is the offence of contempt of court makes the correct terminology somewhat uncertain) of Craig Murray that’s the true cause for concern in this matter.

What’s alarming, as this site has noted previously, is the highly selective and partisan eye with which the Crown Office appears to be pursuing the offence.

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Alex Salmond’s spokesperson has issued the following statement this afternoon. We present it to readers unedited save for added emphasis of two sentences.

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Hey folks, remember the happy days when indyref 2 was going to be in “the first half” of the next Parliament? Well, here comes the totally surprising and unexpected news.

This was Ian Blackford on Sky News yesterday, quietly confirming that at best we can expect it in the SECOND half of the Parliament, ie 2024 at the earliest. (And that’s with all the usual waffly evasiveness about how it could be achieved.)

So if readers were wondering why Blackford had quickly released a squirrel to distract from the appearance, perhaps now they know.

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One month ago, writing a mild political slogan on a wall in Scotland in chalk – which washes off instantly at the first sign of a damp cloth or a small shower of rain – was enough to have uniformed officers of Police Scotland turn up at your door on suspicion of hate crime, conspiracy and breach of the peace.

Of course, that depends wholly on which views you’re expressing.

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This isn’t just a massive middle finger to justice and every voter in Scotland.

This is an act of sabotage.

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We were reminded this week of the amount of stick we got when we wrote these words almost five years ago, right after the 2016 Holyrood election:

(The rest of our post-match analysis wasn’t too shabby either.)

But readers, we have to grudgingly admit: we’re only NEARLY always right.

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Nicola Sturgeon’s progressive New SNP, for people who celebrate punitive rape.

Do give them both your votes, won’t you? #BeKind.

James Hamilton is either a crook, a coward or an idiot.

There is no other viable explanation for this:

There is NO DOUBT OR DISPUTE WHATSOEVER that the Scottish Parliament was misled when Nicola Sturgeon told it that the first she knew of allegations against Alex Salmond was on 2 April 2018. That is a material fact accepted by all sides, because everyone including the First Minister herself now accepts she was told on 29 March.

The question of whether Parliament was misled deliberately, or merely as the result of a vastly implausible slip of Nicola Sturgeon’s memory, is another matter entirely. But that it was misled – told something that was untrue – is not up for debate.

The Fabiani inquiry, which is stuffed with SNP stooges and has been starved of most key evidence, nevertheless still managed to observe that Parliament had been misled, although it made no judgement on whether it happened knowingly or inadvertently.

For James Hamilton, armed with far more evidence, to conclude not merely that the misleading had been accidental but that it didn’t happen at all, is a lie so barefaced as to be breathtaking, and so farcical as to defy any possibility of honest belief.

Especially as we’re not allowed to know how he arrived at that decision:

Much else in his report is bizarre. But that one paragraph alone destroys its credibility utterly and forever. And unfortunately that means that Scotland is lost. Independence is over. All is destroyed.

We had feared, as the very worst case, a fudge in which Hamilton would find, like the Holyrood committee, that Parliament had been misled but would bottle out of saying whether it had been deliberate or not. This conclusion is so utterly mad and ludicrous that it honestly never even entered our consideration as a possibility.

Readers can choose which of the three causes they find most believable, but at the end of the day it just doesn’t matter. Our country is a banana republic, a nation that North Koreans point at and laugh. To be honest, readers, if we were you we’d get out while we still could.

Every Yes supporter in Scotland dreamed of having our own Mandela to lead us to freedom. Unfortunately, we wanted Nelson but we got Winnie instead.

And now our country is no longer a safe place.

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Word reaches us from this afternoon’s meeting of the SNP NEC that three members of the Finance & Audit Committee (ie about half of it, we believe) have resigned on the basis that they’re responsible for the party’s finances but are unable to carry out their duties as chief executive Peter Murrell refuses to give them access to the books.

We don’t yet know if it’s specifically in relation to the missing £600,000 in “ringfenced” fundraiser money that was supposed to have been earmarked for use in a second independence referendum campaign but which cannot be identified in the records of a party whose last published accounts showed only £97,000 in the bank.

(The SNP infamously claimed it was “woven through” the figures. Wings has received no reply to the letter we sent on behalf of some concerned members to party treasurer Douglas Chapman on the subject more than two months ago.)

We gather that the three are Frank Ross (a qualified chartered accountant and current Lord Provost of Edinburgh Council), Livingston company director Cynthia Guthrie and the Mid Scotland & Fife NEC member Allison Graham.

We’ll bring you more on this breaking story as we get it.

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