Wings Over Scotland

The ramifications for Scottish politics of the failed stitch-up of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse have hardly begun to be felt. The Parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which formally began yesterday and is due to start interviewing people in August, looks set to be swamped in material – or at least, whatever material hasn’t been quietly and conveniently disposed of already – and nobody knows how long it’ll take to reach any sort of conclusion.

It seems a safe bet that the SNP leadership will be praying it doesn’t do so before the 2021 Holyrood election, for all sorts of reasons – not least that it appears beyond any credible doubt that Nicola Sturgeon lied to Parliament about the investigation.

But while Salmond was found innocent on every charge, he continues to be attacked from behind a shield of anonymity by the accusers that the mainly-female jury declined to believe, supported and co-ordinated by organisations funded almost entirely by the Scottish Government and with very close personal links to it.

So when we were putting out our latest Panelbase poll, we thought we’d find out what the people of Scotland thought about it.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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Our ongoing quest to discover just who is actually willing to take responsibility for the actions of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond and its aftermath took another diversion yesterday when we received a reply from HM Inspectorate of Prosecutions in Scotland.

It had sounded like a promising lead. After all, HMIPS’ apparent purpose is to “inspect the operation” of COPFS, “improve the way COPFS serves the public” and “make COPFS more accountable”, all of which are exactly what we were after.

Sadly we had another disappointment in store.

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We’ve received a response from the Scottish Government to our follow-up letter of last week regarding the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. It’s attached below.

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With commendable swiftness, we’ve received a reply to our letter of earlier this week to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice. You can read it in full below (click to enlarge).

Sadly, however, it’s precisely the sort of evasion we expected, and it is not acceptable.

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We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.

Which is just two months after this happened:

So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.

As we still haven’t received any response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we sent this letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice today. Some passages have been redacted in accordance with contempt-of-court law.

We hope he’s listening.

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It’s now more than a month since this site revealed the widespread breach by a number of Scottish journalists/newspapers – the most prominent being Dani Garavelli of Scotland On Sunday and Tortoise Media – of the legally-protected anonymity of one of the accusers in the Alex Salmond trial.

Until last week we’d had no response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) beyond an initial acknowledgement, and no action of any kind had apparently been taken against any of the perpetrators, even though the pro-Salmond blogger Craig Murray has been cited for prosecution for allegedly similar breaches.

Alarmingly, all of the information identifying the woman was (and at the time of writing this article is) still publicly available in their articles, exposing her to possible danger. So last week we got in touch with the COPFS to seek clarification.

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Scotland’s media is still unable to contain its outpouring of bitter, resentful rage over Alex Salmond’s exoneration by a jury on trumped-up sexual assault charges.

Flailing blindly in all directions it’s achieving little other than to embarrass itself, such as last night when Scotland On Sunday had to change its front page in a late panic. But the media’s toxic fury at being denied Salmond’s head on a pole has also led it to do something far, far more serious and reckless.

And every one of them knows exactly what they’ve done.

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