Readers may have noticed recent speculation in the media (based on the wording of a press release) that Police Scotland had ended their investigations regarding Operation Branchform. As it happened we’d already submitted a Freedom Of Information request aimed at finding that out, and the response arrived this evening.
You can read it below.
Robin McAlpine published a very important piece yesterday, detailing how the SNP is about to become even more of a leadership dictatorship than it already is.
You can read the article to see why this is a change of enormous importance, and a catastrophic one for the independence movement. It will make it just under 17 times harder for any sitting SNP leader to be challenged for the leadership – let alone defeated – and effectively turns the party into a private oligarchy every bit as total and unaccountable as that of Reform (which is not a member-directed political party in the conventional sense, but a limited company personally owned by Nigel Farage, who holds a majority of the voting shares and can do whatever he pleases with it).
We’re annoyed at ourselves, because we got sent the document revealing the change a month ago, but we missed it. And now we’re going to show you why.
Peter Murrell really ought to have seen the writing on the wall a while ago.
But at least it’s in keeping with her track record.
The Scottish Government just issued another response in the long-running Freedom Of Information battle with alert Wings reader Benjamin Harrop over its conspiracy to frame and imprison the late Alex Salmond on false charges. Here’s a genuine extract.
Yeah, definitely nothing to hide here.
You’ve got to admit, that’s a zinger.
Craig Whyte is a man who knows all about financial doom looming on the horizon of a once-powerful institution. But it doesn’t take an expert with lived experience to spot what’s coming down the line for the SNP.
Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.
When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.
And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.
Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.
As we write this article, Sandy Brindley (on the left of the picture below) is still in post as the CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland.
For as long as that remains the case, rape victims in Scotland will not be safe.
Astonishingly, there isn’t a single word of apology anywhere in this statement.
There isn’t a scintilla of contrition, not the tiniest glimmer of admission of culpability or responsibility. There isn’t even a weasel-worded expression of “regret”.
Rape Crisis Scotland is unfit for purpose, and its CEO must resign.
The dogged persistence of alert Wings contributor Benjamin Harrop with regard to the Hamilton inquiry has been truly heroic, and today it has borne fruit in dramatic style.
The 10-page adjudication from the Scottish Information Commissioner that you can download by clicking that image is a somewhat labyrinthine (but fascinating) read, but the upshot of it is that the Commissioner has now ordered the Scottish Government to release all of the legal advice it was given with regard to its refusal to publish the written evidence submitted to James Hamilton for his inquiry into the events around the alleged conspiracy to falsely convict Alex Salmond of sexual assaults.
(See, even that one-sentence summary was quite hard going.)
But why does that matter and what does it mean?
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
