Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish Parliament’s inquiry into the disastrously botched investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond, which has been paused for several weeks due to the Scottish Government’s repeated refusal to provide it with material it’s requested, resumes today and enters its final and critical phase.

In the next two months all the key players in the shambolic affair, including the current First Minister, her predecessor and both of their chiefs of staff, will give evidence. But today perhaps the most central figure of all will appear. Or rather, she won’t.

Judith Mackinnon, the civil servant whose prior involvement with the complainers in the case was central to the investigation collapsing on the grounds of illegality and bias, will speak to the committee remotely and in audio only, robbing them of the ability to see her face and body language – things highly critical to any interrogation.

The apparent reason for this, according to a recent report in the Times, is Mackinnon’s being “targeted on social media”. No further details of this “targeting” are given.

And there’s one rather big problem with that claim.

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Unlike the Hulk, this site very much prefers Andrew Tickell (previously Lallands Peat Worrier) when he’s angry, as opposed to his rather more customary appearance these days as a hearty and affable chronicler of life from the cosy perspective of someone embarking on a lifelong career in Scotland’s well-fed academic/media/legal elite.

He’s on fine fettle as the former in The National today:

The paragraph above is unfailingly true. But if Tories don’t even care about being seen to starve hungry children – just about the most monstrous, inhuman thing imaginable, as Tickell notes in cold, eloquent fury – it completely escapes our understanding why a substantial proportion of people still appear to believe they’ll give Scotland a second referendum out of some sense of morality and decency, just because they’ll have lost yet another election in a country that hasn’t voted Tory in the best part of 70 years.

We’re running out of time. We need a better plan.

The dead hand running the show at SNP HQ is no better illustrated than by the career path of Shirley-Anne Somerville.

For despite her failure to succeed in role after role, election after election, her star continues to ascend through the patronage of the SNP’s inner sanctum and to the bemusement of ordinary members and parliamentarians.

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Voting is now open in the selection contests to determine who the SNP’s candidates at next year’s election will be. Given the extremely dodgy secret-Survey-Monkey-ballot shenanigans recently adopted by the party NEC, we’re uncomfortably reminded of a famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”.

An excellent blog by the former SNP Trade & Industry spokesman Iain Lawson today highlights the near-impossibility of effecting change from within the SNP now, due to changes made by the leadership to eliminate the influence of ordinary members.

Indeed, so secure do the party’s controlling faction consider themselves that they now feel able to openly call their own supporters “bitches”.

But not quite SO secure that they still don’t want to cheat.

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On Sunday we told you about Mridul Wadhwa, a man who deceived his way into a job at a rape crisis centre and now wants to be an SNP MSP, in a seat where the party supposedly has an all-woman shortlist. The story was picked up today by the Times.

But Wadhwa isn’t the only man trying to muscle in on a woman-only shortlist.

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We’re not wholly convinced by prospective SNP candidate Toni Giugliano’s credentials as an impartial voice on the trans-vs-women’s-rights issue, given that he previously referred to Joan McAlpine as a “bigot”. But the statement below – it’s good to speak to people on both sides of a debate – is surely the very definition of sense and reason.

(The person in question, incidentally, is Caroline McAllister, who the SNP NEC blocked from contesting the Dumbarton seat Giugliano wants to stand for.)

Yet that simple and wildly uncontroversial position – that the view shared by the vast majority of the population should at the minimum be heard and considered – caused a predictable storm of fury from the SNP’s woke faction, who directly equated a belief in biology and women’s rights with bigotry, racism and Nazism.

We attach a representative selection below. Can any alert readers spot the common link between all these people who are beside themselves with outrage that the subject of women’s rights should even be discussed or debated?

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Television’s transforming before our eyes, as both what we watch and how we watch it changes. An ever-greater number of programmes shown through increasing mediums. But that doesn’t equate to balanced political coverage being provided, quality product displayed, or distinct countries reflected.

The United States, despite the great wealth and talent available to it in Hollywood and elsewhere, is the worse for the absence of a properly funded and high quality public broadcasting service. Its society is the poorer and its democracy badly distorted by its absence. It’s why Scotland needs a properly funded public broadcaster.

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If there’s still anyone left reading this site who doubts that the SNP National Executive Committee is currently engaged in a coup against the membership of the party, meant to be a fait accompli by the time the NEC is up for re-election at the end of November, we’d urge you to read the extremely disturbing letter below from the Convener of the party’s Constituency Association (CA) in Dumbarton, which he’s attempting to circulate to local members against obstruction from the NEC (pictured), who have shut down the branch mailer system from party HQ to stop the CA speaking to its members.

(We first saw it on Iain Lawson’s excellent blog, and are carrying out the request for it to be as widely distributed as possible.)

It’s long, so we’ve highlighted a couple of passages of particular interest.

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Holiday Boy is off for the next fortnight, readers, but there’s no way he’d have come up with anything funnier than this anyway.

We’re not sure he’s got the name right. But we’ll add that one to the list.

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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