Wings Over Scotland

We’ve had another Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government.

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The most tedious question we ever get asked when we criticise the SNP – because we’ve explained it a hundred times already and none of the people asking have ever bothered to look – is “But what would YOU do to secure independence, clever-clogs?”

We’ve outlined that plan in detail repeatedly – you can read it again here if you want. But maybe we need something a bit simpler for the hard of thinking, so let’s have a go.

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We just noticed a finding from the most recent opinion poll that surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of every Scottish newspaper except the Press & Journal.

As far as we can ascertain, the P&J was alone in reporting the obviously newsworthy fact that just a quarter of Scots believe the First Minister’s ridiculous cock-and-bull story about “forgetting” the occasion when she first heard that her friend, colleague and mentor of 30 years was facing charges of trying to rape some of her other friends.

But the figures are part of a wider and depressing trend.

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When even someone as catastrophically vacant as Alex Cole-Hamilton thinks he’s got your number, it’s probably time to accept that the game’s up.

But that’s the unenviable position the First Minister finds herself in today.

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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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Back in the 1980s there was a hit game for the ZX Spectrum home computer called Worse Things Happen At Sea. In it you play a robot whose job is to get a heavily-laden cargo ship safely to port, except that more and more disasters keep befalling it.

It springs leaks, it veers off course, the engine overheats and the robot’s power runs down, until eventually the catalogue of catastrophes overwhelms the harassed metallic custodian and the boat slides down into the murky depths.

We wonder if that feels familiar to anyone at the moment.

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On 23rd March this year, after Alex Salmond was found not guilty of 13 criminal charges in the High Court, I called on the Scottish Government to set up a judge-led inquiry into the allegation that he had been the subject of a conspiracy involving the Scottish Government, which resulted in him being accused of criminal behaviour.

Today I am repeating my call for such an inquiry.

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Readers, we can’t tell you how much we want to get back to just dissecting Scotland’s hopeless Unionist media for a living. It’s a lot more fun than what the current political circumstances are obliging us to do, so you can hardly imagine our excitement when we spotted what looked like an open goal in yesterday’s Mail On Sunday.

Our ears pricked up immediately at the sight of the words “up to”, which is invariably a sign of dodgy doings on the way, and so it proved. The article contained no solid data at all about the size of Scottish Government special advisers’ pay rises, only how many SpAds there were and which general pay bands they were in, each of which spans a wide range of between £14,000 and £23,000.

But while the Mail had spooned the sitter six feet over the crossbar – because the crude spin they’d put on it was total rubbish – there was still a loose ball just waiting to be knocked into the back of the net.

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Geoff Bush is an SNP member.

SNP Members For Independence? What a ridiculous phrase – surely every member of the SNP is in favour of independence, right?

That’s mostly true of course, but the leadership and many elected representatives of the party appear to be intent on repeating the failed Section 30 route to independence, and also on restricting serious debate about alternative strategies.

It seems that a revised “Plan B” may be discussed at the party conference, still almost two months away, and for all Plan B’s merits it is seriously flawed and its inclusion at the expense of alternative and better plans at conference would merely pay lip service to the term “serious debate”

Something clearly needed to be done, which is why SNP Members For Indy has been set up. So what’s it for and what is it trying to do?

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We’re very busy today writing more FOI requests and the like, so we’ll just take a brief moment here to note that hiring super-expensive lawyers to object to the questions you’re being asked DEFINITELY sounds like the behaviour of people who are keen to co-operate fully and in the most transparent way possible with an inquiry:

See you later, gang.