Wings Over Scotland

This post was written by an SNP NEC member present at last week’s controversial Zoom meeting, who wishes to remain anonymous. Wings has verified their credentials.

A farce, a shambles, an incompetent mess. There’s no other way to sum up the NEC stitch-up of the Edinburgh Central seat last week.

Bad enough was the situation of the Glasgow Cathcart seat, over which my sources tell me it didn’t take long for someone in ministerial tower to realise “but what if Dornan jumps ship to an Indy list party, we’ve just given them a seat in Parliament to promote why our both votes SNP message doesn’t make sense.”

And of course those looking at what really matters in the near future were noting “we could already be relying on Derek Mackay to turn back up at Parliament – and for Mark McDonald to crawl out from the bus we threw him under – to survive a confidence vote if the inquiry doesn’t go our way, now we’ve just lost Dornan’s vote, the Greens are going to hold us to ransom…” 

Fast forward a mere day and James Dornan didn’t even need to threaten legal action to get that decision overturned.

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So we guess this is an answer to our question:

But there are many more questions.

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It seems fair to say that the SNP’s shady, ugly coup d’etwats yesterday hasn’t gone down massively well. Social media was awash in pictures of cut-up membership cards and resignation letters, and some of the most moderate voices in the commentariat also decried the stitch-ups of Joanna Cherry and James Dornan.

The NEC meeting which forced through the new rules was held in secret and nobody knows who was present or who voted for what. Indeed, even the identities of the NEC’s members are largely not public knowledge.

But there’s one thing we do know.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

What’s interesting is specifically the video.

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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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