We’ve just been sent this report from today’s meeting of the SNP’s National Executive Committee, which ended a short time ago. There’s no official confirmation yet but it’s come to us from several independent sources and we’re sure it’s true.
(“NS” and “JC” are of course Nicola Sturgeon and Joanna Cherry.)
We couldn’t see any other outcome than this as soon as the decision was passed to the SPCB, because the Unionist parties have the majority of votes on it.
So it looks as though the Scottish Government’s desperate stalling is finally at an end, and two months after it was supposed to have happened we’re all about to have a very interesting day indeed. We can’t wait.
While we wait for this story to unfold:
Let’s catch up on a few things. Scottish politics is moving very fast at the moment, and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss stuff.
Lady Dorrian’s full judgement and reasoning in respect of last week’s hearing involving The Spectator has been published on the Scottish Courts website.
It contains nothing that those who listened in on the case by telephone last week didn’t hear for themselves – it’s simply an 11-page summary of what was debated in court and casts no new light on what Lady Dorrian said at the time.
We’ll be very interested to see whether or not The Spectator – or perhaps more to the point its lawyers, who we must presume had vetted and cleared the initial publication just as Alex Salmond’s lawyers had – now feels able to restore the redacted paragraph that it removed after what it can now be publicly revealed was a threat from the Crown Office (a threat also received by this website).
The magazine’s response today is non-committal on the subject.
While it is this site’s belief that the paragraph in question DOES NOT identify anyone as a complainer – the Crown Office has not communicated which “other evidence” it feels could be combined with the paragraph, which makes no reference whatsoever to the criminal case, to provide identification – the restoration of the missing paragraph would certainly appear to provide circumstantial evidence to that effect, something which would be entirely due to the intervention of the Crown Office.
But overall, the needless delay in publishing this document has merely run down the clock on the inquiry by another week – time that it can ill afford – without providing any real additional clarity.
(We’re a bit puzzled as to why The Spectator’s counsel appears to have given up so easily on the second element of their application, which sought to specifically permit the publication of both Salmond and Geoff Aberdein’s written evidence.)
The fact that the judgement wasn’t released yesterday probably means, at a minimum, no more evidence sessions until next week, as the committee generally only meets on Tuesdays. We hope that doesn’t become a crucial issue, but we fear that the written judgement is sufficiently tepid that the crooked SNP members of the committee, and the spineless Andy Wightman, will use it to justify rejecting Salmond’s evidence and therefore hearing from him in person, rendering the entire undertaking moot anyway.
Ulster-bred (specifically the ultra-Loyalist stronghold of Antrim) columnist Neil Mackay, a man who’s been systematically undermining and dividing the Yes movement since at least 2015 while claiming to be part of it, has an opinion piece in the Herald today.
In its own way it’s an exemplar of the infiltrator’s craft. Let’s take a look.
Okay, we’re trolling a bit with the title there. But fair’s fair.
Because some REALLY shonky, and very obviously co-ordinated, shenanigans went on this past weekend, but at least the above is the truth.
The two main centres of infection for the woke entryist poison currently disfiguring the SNP are Stirling and Aberdeen, where they coalesce around two Westminster MPs – Twitler Youth gauleiter Alyn Smith and the worryingly unhinged Kirsty Blackman.
In recent months Wings has documented numerous attempts by the faction (which is chiefly characterised by its hyper-extremist and fundamentalist version of transgender ideology) to gerrymander and fix the party’s internal election processes to ensure that its disciples – who are enormously unpopular among the grassroots membership and have repeatedly failed to win by playing fair – get selected as candidates.
But now they’re really scraping the barrel.
It’s our sad duty to report this fact to you, readers: our experience of sending Freedom Of Information requests to the Scottish Government is basically that the more answers you get from them, the less information you end up having.
See below for a case in point.
In an attempt to freshen up its usual panel of tired and tiresome politicians and pundits, last night’s Question Time (ostensibly from an oddly-vague location in “the North East”) featured moderately-known circus fortune-teller Gypsy Rose Petulengro, crossing her palm with silver for some analysis in a short break from one of her celebrated seances.
The clip above was her take on whether Nicola Sturgeon would resign if either of the current inquiries found that she’d systematically and repeatedly lied to Parliament and broken the Ministerial Code, and the strange thing about it was that for someone who was professing to be looking into the future, she didn’t even appear to know the basic pertinent facts of the present or the past.
So it looks like The Spectator spent a lot of money on a lawyer for nothing today.
Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
