Wings Over Scotland

It was my birthday yesterday, readers. (Late presents still accepted. The cheapest one is fine.) I got taken out to lunch and there was someone’s new kitten to play with, but mostly what flooded in wasn’t birthday cards but new scandal about the SNP.

It’s hard to know where to even start tackling the avalanche of new information. There were extraordinary revelations from the Salmond inquiry. There were other shocking revelations about the investigation. There was Alex Salmond’s request for the separate independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon to determine whether she lied to Parliament (which it should have been doing in the first place).

We’ll get to all that stuff in due course. But because there’s nothing like a good delve through some data, we’ll kick off with the SNP accounts.

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The Electoral Commission has finally published the SNP’s 2019 accounts.

As Wings has been warning for most of this year, something in the region of £700,000 in supposedly “ring-fenced” money raised by two crowdfunding campaigns has indeed vanished into the maw of the party machine, leaving just under £97,000 in the bank.

(More than £300,000 down on last year, despite a £600,000 increase in “donations”, the bulk of which in fact came from the UK government).

This has happened despite the party angrily and categorically insisting that the money would NOT be spent until there was a new independence referendum.

What all that means is that if the UK government were to unexpectedly turn round tomorrow and grant a Section 30 order for a second indyref, Wings Over Scotland would have considerably more money in the bank to fight it than the SNP does.

The SNP also has a Holyrood election to fight in six months’ time, which normally costs it somewhere in the region of £1.5m – far more than its current total net assets of £272,000. As we told you back in January, the party is simply in no financial position to fight a new referendum campaign, which is very likely part of the reason it’s been in no rush to secure one for the last few years and has no remotely credible plan to do so.

It’s a matter of debate whether obtaining such sums of money under false pretences is a criminal offence or not. We invite anyone concerned about this state of affairs to ask the SNP what happened to their donation. We wish you good luck getting an answer.

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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At the weekend we made a half-joke about who’d be counting the votes in the SNP’s candidate elections to determine who’d be standing for Holyrood next year.

The joke just got a bit less funny.

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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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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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The battle to save the soul of the SNP – formerly a party of Scottish independence but now a career vehicle for intolerant science-denying cultists solely interested in social engineering – is already almost lost.

By delaying its online pretend “conference” until the end of November, the party has ensured that the chronically dysfunctional current National Executive Committee (NEC) controls the selection of candidates for next year’s election, and it’s using that power every bit as crookedly as anyone who’s been paying attention recently might fear.

Following the stitch-up of Joanna Cherry, the latest victim of the SNP’s woke cabal is Caroline McAllister, a woman who the party considers quite fit to be a councillor – and indeed the Deputy Leader of its group on West Dunbartonshire council – but who has suddenly somehow become unacceptable when she tried to seek nomination for the MSP seat currently held by Jackie Baillie of Scottish Labour.

She is, of course, far from alone.

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At the climax of a popular and multiple-Oscar-winning movie from 1995, the Scottish leader William Wallace is portrayed heroically roaring the word “FREEDOM!”

Unfortunately, at the time he’s bound by ropes to a wooden table, having been hanged until half-dead and then had his intestines torn out with a knife shortly before someone lops his head off with an axe, cuts his body into several parts and displays them on spikes all around Scotland as a warning to anyone who might seek its independence.

It’s in this sense that we’re forced to assume the Scottish Government has interpreted the word “freedom” in the phrase “freedom of information”.

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We’ve had another Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government.

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We’ve just received the most extraordinary Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government, readers. Trust us, you want to go and make yourselves a strong cup of tea before you read it. Or get this guy to bring you one.

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When even someone as catastrophically vacant as Alex Cole-Hamilton thinks he’s got your number, it’s probably time to accept that the game’s up.

But that’s the unenviable position the First Minister finds herself in today.

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