Wings Over Scotland

SNP MSP James Dornan is someone Wings always had a lot of time for, at least until his shameful and central role in the stitch-up of Mark McDonald – an act which was the foundation stone for all of the party’s subsequent chicanery. We can only speculate as to his motivations for doing so, and their connection or otherwise to a certain deranged and ambitious fantasist in his close circle.

But as anyone who’s watched The Usual Suspects (or GoodFellas, or pretty much any classic-era Bond movie) will tell you, the real villains have a nasty habit, once they’ve achieved their goals, of “tidying up” anyone who might link them to their misdeeds – especially if those people don’t fit the ideal of their brave new worlds.

So an old, straight, white, working-class male like James Dornan, who signed the SNP Women’s Pledge, was always likely to find himself propping up a motorway flyover at some point sooner or later, and thus it has proved.

Read the rest of this entry →

Out of 100, exactly how humiliated do you feel today on learning that the leadership of your party has so little faith in you winning the Edinburgh Central nomination fair and square – despite all your advantages, connections and long party history – that it’s had to stack the deck with such an unprecedented, transparent, embarrassing fiddle to try to get you in? Because tbh, if it was us we’d be too ashamed to show our face.

No rush, take as long as you like. Just like you’re doing with independence.

The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:

So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:

That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.

Read the rest of this entry →

Late last week, Wings finally received a long-overdue full response to the queries we first made to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) in early April, regarding several matters connected to the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond.

(You’re supposed to get a reply in 20 working days. It’s been nearly four months.)

The unmappable fog-filled labyrinth that COPFS (under the Lord Advocate, W. James Wolffe QC), the Scottish Government and the civil service are attempting to construct around these matters is so tangled that it’s taken us a few days to sit down and make some sense of it, but the truth that’s being coaxed, painfully slowly, into the light is one that paints a truly disturbing picture.

We invite you to examine it for yourself and see if you disagree.

Read the rest of this entry →

So something quite interesting just happened, and we don’t mean this race:

What’s interesting is specifically the video.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →