Wings Over Scotland

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?

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There may, readers, be a connection between this:

and this:

But the key fact about the SNP is the same either way.

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We’ve just watched a hearing at the Court Of Session with regard to Alex Salmond’s civil claim against the Scottish Government. It was an ostensibly minor one, in which Salmond’s team were requesting a sist (pause) in the case for the fourth time, on the grounds of a number of ongoing police inquiries related to the events around the claim.

For most of the time Wings was the only journalist in a (virtual) room full of lawyers – although a couple of Scottish Daily Mail hacks turned up midway through – and we got to hear a dramatic surprise revelation.

James Hynd is a civil servant who was head of the Scottish Government’s cabinet, parliament and governance division during the inquiry.

(And he may still be – he’s a man with a microscopic digital footprint, and pretty much every piece of what little there is to be found concerns the inquiry. Indeed, the same is true of his entire department, which is extremely publicity-shy.)

But the hearing revealed for the first time that Hynd is currently subject to a criminal investigation by Police Scotland, with the name Operation Broadcroft, on suspicion of the serious crime of “wilfully making false statements on oath” to the inquiry.

And the ramifications of that extend much further than Mr Hynd himself.

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David Davis may be the last of his kind – a libertarian Tory from a council-scheme and grammar-school background, and also one of the few remaining big beasts occupying the political jungle of the back benches.

(He could in fact have been Tory leader, and would have been if David Cameron and George Osborne hadn’t teamed up to defeat him in 2005 after he won the first ballot.)

He resigned from Cameron’s shadow cabinet in June 2008 on a principled issue of civil liberties (winning the subsequent by-election with a massive 72% of the vote) and from Theresa May’s Cabinet over Brexit, and he was one of a tiny handful of MPs prepared to defend Julian Assange from extradition.

And in 2022 it was Davis who rose from the back benches to tell Boris Johnson to “in the name of God, go”.

So on the rare occasions when he leads a Commons adjournment debate, as he did last Thursday evening, those with an educated eye for politics sit up and take notice.

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You should probably watch the whole of this speech by Sir David Davis this evening, even if you saw the trailer three and a quarter years ago.

It’s both a comprehensive refresher of events surrounding the Scottish Government’s conspiracy to convict Alex Salmond on false charges, and a sharp reminder of why Scotland is, in truth, not yet a country in a fit administrative state for independence.

But one part in particular ought to be the headline news tonight.

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Particularly alert readers may recall this from a few months ago:

An SNP pledge? About independence? Bound to be kept, then, right?

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We’re going to be really, REALLY generous and not quibble about the “us”.

Because it’s not even nearly the funniest thing here.

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We suppose we should talk about the general election for a bit.

It’s going to be awful. Will that do?

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We were going to write a follow-up piece to this last week, until the SNP detonated a hand-grenade in its own trouser pocket. But with the coronation of John Swinney this afternoon after the only challenger sold out for some shiny beads and trinkets, we can get back to some serious news.

The controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which has been involved in a number of serious child sexual abuse scandals, continues to exert considerable influence on Scotland’s education system, thanks to extremely lavish funding from taxpayers – well over a million pounds from hard-pressed councils in the last year alone to address unspecified issues whose urgency is difficult to identify.

After our last piece we sent LGBTYS a letter raising our concerns about their improper interference with primary schools, something we were obliged to do before we could file a formal complaint with Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR.

We received an automated reply on 24 April saying “We are currently experiencing staff shortages and it may take up to a week to respond to your email.”

That deadline expired five days ago, and we will now be writing to the OSCR. But in the meantime LGBTYS persists in exceeding its remit, with deeply alarming results.

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We’ve already posted a shorter and snappier soundbite from this video on our Twitter, but it’s really worth watching the full version here:

Because the body language is remarkable. For three and a half minutes, Neil Gray is completely unable to look his former colleague – an SNP MSP until a few months ago, a fellow government minister until 2022 –  in the eye.

He sits stiff as a board, his teeth gritted, his face like thunder, staring directly ahead at the back wall of the studio as Ash Regan patiently and calmly outlines the extremely modest requirements Alba had set out in return for supporting Humza Yousaf and the SNP government in Parliamentary votes of confidence.

And when host Stephen Jardine asks him what exactly was so unreasonable about them, he can’t help himself, and blurts out that it was really all about preventing Alex Salmond from regaining any sort of influence on Scottish politics and insisting that his “rehabilitation” could not be permitted, even if the result of blocking it was the loss of an SNP First Minister and the potential bringing down of an SNP government.

And at this point a fair-minded person might ask: rehabilitation from what, precisely?

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We apologise for making you look at Ross Greer’s face on a weekend.

But what he said to the Holyrood Sources podcast yesterday is important.

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Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph has filed a series of excellent but deeply disturbing articles this month about the growing presence in Scottish primary schools of LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity which has been heavily involved in not one but two serious child abuse scandals, one of them the most horrific in Scottish history.

But LGBTYS seems to be able to do whatever it wants.

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