Wings Over Scotland

Wings has been informed this morning by a reliable source that Police Scotland have now progressed their inquiry into the SNP’s “missing” £600,000 fundraiser money from an “assessment” to a formal criminal investigation into the matter, which was first revealed on this site in January 2020. We understand that an official statement to that effect will be forthcoming shortly.

[EDIT 12.27pm: the statement is below.]

”Police Scotland has now received seven complaints in relation to donations that were made to the Scottish National Party.

“After assessment and consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we will now carry out an investigation.

“Enquiries are continuing and anyone who has any information which may assist with this investigation is asked to contact police.”

We look forward to the eventual outcome and continue our retirement in the meantime. Those still loyal to the party leadership wishing to be reassured that everything is fine and above board and the whole thing is a mad conspiracy theory and a total non-story are directed to Wee Ginger Dug and to the Twitter accounts of Pete Wishart, Mhairi Hunter, Tom Arthur, Stewart McDonald, Tom Gordon and David Leask, as usual.

Holiday Boy is still “resting”, so here’s a laugh from nearly six years ago.

Hear the bang? See the spark? No, us either.

Alert readers will have noticed that our quasi-regular crayonsmith Slacky The Holiday Boy is off again this week (and indeed next week), so as a special emergency service we bring you something almost as funny, albeit in a rather darker vein than usual.

The punchline, of course, is the last sentence of paragraph 9.

Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.

Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.

This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.

And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.

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Craig Murray was today sentenced to eight months in prison for the crime of “jigsaw identification” of one or more of the complainers in the trial of Alex Salmond, despite the supposed existence in Scotland of a presumption against prison sentences for any crimes attracting a penalty of less than 12 months.

We believe he is the first person ever to be convicted of this extremely vaguely-defined crime, and certainly the first ever sentenced to imprisonment for it.

In her judgement Lady Dorrian cited a number of factors, one of which was that the case was an extremely high-profile one which had attracted a great deal of media attention. This was of course in large part due to the actions of an “unknown” person within the Scottish Government or Scottish civil service who illegally leaked the story to David Clegg, then of the Daily Record and now editor of The Courier.

In reality everyone in Scottish politics knows who this person was and whose orders they were acting under, but even though they’re not the subject of any current court case we cannot say their names or we too would face prosecution and imprisonment. (As ever, DO NOT speculate or hint about their identities in comments. Any such comments will be deleted and the commenter banned.)

In sentencing Murray to incarceration rather than the fine which is almost always used for contempt charges, Lady Dorrian emphasised the danger of dissuading victims of crime, and especially sexual assaults, from reporting the offence if they thought they might be identified publicly.

But it must be noted that NONE of the complainers against Mr Salmond were victims of any crime. The jury heard their evidence and the defence evidence – the latter of which went almost entirely unreported except by Craig Murray – and concluded that none of them had in fact been assaulted in any way whatsoever.

Several of the complainers gave evidence which in the light of the verdict suggested a strong case for charges of perjury, but no prosecutions (or, as far as we’re aware, even investigations) have followed.

At least 10 Scottish newspaper journalists have also published information which by any empirical measure enables the identification of complainers. Two separate independently-conducted opinion polls have found that far more people claim to have identified complainers via these newspaper publications than from Craig Murray’s blog. All the articles in question remain online, yet none of their authors have even been questioned or warned by the Crown Office or police, let alone prosecuted.

(The Crown Office has for over a year refused to tell this site whether we’re allowed to quote those articles or not.)

Craig Murray is only one of a long list of people supportive of Alex Salmond to have been prosecuted in connection with his trial – others, including this site, have been threatened – while absolutely nobody hostile to Mr Salmond has faced any criminal action. The official in charge of prosecutions in Scotland, the Lord Advocate James Wolffe, is a minister of the Scottish Government directly answerable to the First Minister. We are sure these matters are unconnected.

We understand, though we have not confirmed, that Craig Murray remains at liberty for now, pending a request for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. He is an elderly man of previously impeccable character with a number of serious health conditions which could create a severe risk to his life in prison, and who clearly poses absolutely no sort of danger to society. His appeal fund is linked at the bottom of this post.

“Why can’t you just be kind?” is the signature cry of the transcult. Anyone professing a belief in the material reality of biology in 2021 is viciously attacked as a cruel and heartless bigot for refusing to affirm and validate this sort of madness:

(We had to look up “Achillean” too.)

But it’s those who indulge it who are the monsters here.

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The grim thing is, the Daily Record’s headline isn’t even a lie.

You can check by listening to the interview yourself here, from 2h 10m.

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“They don’t even live in Scotland!”  

It really is quite uncanny how similar some SNP supporters have become to the most frothing, abusive blood-and-soil Yoons of 2014. But we can live with this company:

And let’s make something very clear.

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We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.

He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.

(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)

So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.

And yet here we are.

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Dr Malcolm Kerr joined the SNP in 1967, has contested local council and Scottish Parliament elections and is currently an activist in Cunninghame North constituency.

I’ve been a member of the SNP for long enough to recall the days when the party was capable of generating killer slogans. “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. “Independence – Nothing Less”. Those were the days!

Nothing describes the SNP’s descent towards being the new New Labour better than its choice of slogans in recent years. “Stronger for Scotland” serves only to flag up just how powerless the party’s large contingent at Westminster is. “Progress” is entirely meaningless.

And fellow activists and members may recall just how depressing it was to attend the most recent in-person spring Conference, when the leadership felt that the slogan “Hope” was going to be inspiring. When you’ve been in power for 14 years you’re supposed to DO things, not just hope for them.

We’re getting to the point where we should soon be Blairite enough to invade Iraq. Fortunately, we lack the means.

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Yesterday we mentioned an SNP election leaflet that someone had posted on social media. It turns out that either deliberately or accidentally (probably the latter, while taking out the bit with their name and address on it) they’d cropped off part of it containing a logo that does passingly refer to independence. You can see it down at the bottom-right corner.

So we should note that by way of clarification. But what’s more interesting about the rest of the leaflet is that if you took the logos off it, it could be from literally ANY of the parties contesting the election. It contains no policies whatsoever, just some general feelgood sloganeering. Which parties, do you suppose, are campaigning AGAINST “equipping children to succeed” or “supporting businesses” or “creating jobs”?

The deeper truth is that the leaflet demonstrates how completely pointless this election actually is, because nothing you do with your vote next month is going to affect anything that happens in the subsequent five years. Only one party is going to win, and once they do it won’t matter what’s in the 76-page “manifesto” they released today. The manifesto is a fake – in reality it amounts to a single line: “keep us in power so we can fill our pockets and do whatever we like for another half a decade, suckers”.

Allow us to illustrate.

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