In a post last month we referenced a ZX Spectrum computer game from 1984 called “Worse Things Happen At Sea”. Today as we watched the First Minister on the Andrew Marr Show, we were put in mind of another nautical-disaster-themed one from a great deal nearer to the end of the Speccy’s life.
It was grim viewing in every sense.
We couldn’t help but chuckle yesterday when the £100K-a-year Westminster MP and obsessive Wings Over Scotland reader “Pension Pete” Wishart announced – in the space of six minutes – that this site was simultaneously an irrelevance that nobody listened to, but also somehow one of the greatest threats to independence.
It got a lot funnier today, though.
As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.
One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.
(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)
So let’s see what we know.
The SNP has still not provided any sort of meaningful answer, either to this site or to anyone else, over the missing £600,000 from the party’s accounts that was supposedly “ring-fenced” for a future independence campaign and not under any circumstances to be spent on normal party politics.
Enquiries from members and even elected representatives have met with a wall of silence for months, so we were more than a little surprised to be forwarded a recent email exchange in which the SNP’s chief executive had engaged in discussion on the subject with someone who isn’t even in the party.
We thought you’d be interested in reading it.
We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.
So here’s this week’s.
We have to admit the line below takes some chutzpah to even attempt. It’s a little bit like Harold Shipman refusing to admit to all the murders he committed on the grounds that revealing the victim/patients’ personal data would break the Hippocratic Oath.
We know, for an absolute and uncontested fact, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, that the First Minister has already committed the most serious breach of the Ministerial Code possible – lying to Parliament (section 1.3c). She lied about the date she first knew of the allegations against Salmond.
From the First Minister’s own personal written testimony, we know that the reason she lied to Parliament was that she had definitely also committed another breach of the Code, either by using Scottish Parliament premises for party matters (section 1.3i) or by failing to record government business discussed therein (sections 4.22, 4.23).
So it seems a bit late to be getting all bashful about the Code now.
Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.
Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.
The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.
These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).
Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.
(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)
We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.
In today’s Sunday National:
Well, that’s good to know. Which members exactly?
It’s important not to understate the magnitude of the chance we’re missing.
TO: Colin Beattie MSP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 28 October 2020
Dear Colin,
I note that today you’ve sent an email to SNP members on the contentious topic of the party’s supposedly “ring-fenced” referendum campaign fund, which we’ve learned for the first time today has a grand official name – the Referendum Appeal Fund (which from here on we’ll call the RAF for short).
The email also contains some rather offensive implied smears about my website and myself, but I’m quite used to being abused on the internet so I’ll let that slide. As we’re both on the side of Scottish independence, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match I thought I’d try to reach a constructive consensus.
I notice that in your email you invite people who have “any questions” on the subject to contact you without hesitation, and while I’m not a member of the party I believe I do speak for a considerable number of people who are, so it would likely also save you a lot of tedious copy-and-pasting if you replied publicly to me as their representative.
(And because, y’know, if you don’t then you’ll probably get about a thousand individual emails from members containing the text below anyway, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time.)
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
