We’re very busy today writing more FOI requests and the like, so we’ll just take a brief moment here to note that hiring super-expensive lawyers to object to the questions you’re being asked DEFINITELY sounds like the behaviour of people who are keen to co-operate fully and in the most transparent way possible with an inquiry:
See you later, gang.
Incredible, really. Just one day after we accuse the SNP of trying to dodge its problems by hiding from them and censoring anyone who brings them up, this happens:
Plenty of SNP members, including the party’s former Trade And Industry spokesman, know this approach is untenable. It really is time the SNP started listening to them. A party that scurries away bleating in terror every time it’s threatened with the slightest scrutiny is plainly not capable of winning the hard fight for independence.
Here’s one more for the list.
The comments from committee convener and SNP MP Linda Fabiani (we guess she must be another of those MI5 plants/secret Unionists) are really quite extraordinary. In terms of Parliamentary language they’re only a hair’s-breadth short of an invitation to step outside and settle things with an old-school dust-up in the car park.
The weekend just past saw a convulsion as big as any we can ever recall witnessing on Yes social media, triggered by a series of tweets by Nicola Sturgeon which caused an extraordinary negative reaction out of all proportion to their ostensible content.
The reason was that the First Minister – who had remained silent about countless episodes of hideous misogynistic abuse aimed from her own side at MPs and MSPs like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry – had chosen to suddenly leap into action in defence of the toxically divisive horror that is Glasgow councillor Rhiannon Spear after Spear had been widely criticised for making blatantly false claims in a video promoting her attempt to be selected as the candidate for Argyll & Bute.
(Sturgeon had no such public condemnation for the torrents of abuse the SNP Twitler Youth then unleased on Kirsten Thornton, the female SNP activist and Generation Yes founder who’d pointed out Spear’s untruths.)
The move sent the party’s woke and sane factions into a frenzy of bloodletting which in itself will have little if any impact on the wider electorate, but nonetheless threw into sharp relief the life-and-death battle currently going on for the SNP’s soul.
And since that’s related to what we’ve been writing about on Wings for the bulk of this year, it seemed worthwhile to get some things down on the record once and for all.
Just two days ago the Electoral Commission gave us a fourth supposed date for the publication of the SNP’s 2019 accounts: having first been due out in early August, they then told us to expect them in early September, and then last week, and then in “the next three weeks”, ie the middle of October.
But someone gave us a tipoff that we might be able to request them via Freedom Of Information, since ostensibly the only holdup was that the EC wanted to wait until ALL of the main parties’ accounts were ready and publish them all at once for tidiness.
So we sent one in, and we just got a very quick reply.
We saw something disturbing in Parliament today.
During a debate on the UK government’s recent decision to abandon the notion of gender self-ID, SNP MP Anne McLaughlin told the Commons chamber that it was still the Scottish Government’s “strong commitment” to go ahead with highly controversial reform of the law BEFORE next year’s Holyrood election.
But that isn’t what Scottish voters were told earlier this year.
The SNP have historically been swift to suspend any party members when there’s any hint of inappropriate conduct, never mind even a whiff of illegality. It’s been that way since 2015, with the axe falling on elected members as well as candidates in target seats and critical elections, and ordinary activists.
Not even a by-your-leave, let alone an explanation, is afforded – just suspension with immediate effect. And that’s all well and good, some might say. No hint of impropriety should attach to the party and making a virtue of acting swiftly can be both necessary and appropriate.
So why then no action against the Chief Executive?
Senator Claire Chandler is a Liberal Party member of the Australian Parliament. Some recent experiences she’s had send a very serious warning about the likely outcomes of the Scottish Government’s wildly unpopular new Hate Crime Bill. She’s graciously allowed us to publish this column she wrote on the subject.
Early this month I received a letter from Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner directing me to attend a compulsory “conciliation” conference with somebody offended by my comments about the need to protect women’s sport and women’s toilets and changerooms. You can watch them here:
Ironically, the complaint against me was about an opinion article I wrote about free speech. You can read it here and make up your own mind whether bureaucrats at the Anti-Discrimination Commission should be able to censor any Australian citizens for this kind of public policy discussion.
Following up this morning’s article, we’ve been trawling through the Publications/FOI section of the Scottish Government website to see which other articles might be being hidden from its search function. We found quite a few, and you’re never going to guess what the common factor in all of them is.
We’ve given you a wee clue with that picture, though.
We’ve just sent a Freedom Of Information request to the Scottish Government.
You can read it below.
Whichever side you’re on, it’s simply observably true that the Scottish Government is doing everything in its power to obstruct, delay and derail the Parliamentary inquiry into its ruinously botched investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond.
Any investigative journalist attempting to get to the bottom of the subject and find out what really happened is met with a wall of secrecy and misinformation while trying to navigate their way through the publicly-available information, and just to give you some idea of what it’s like, we’d like to offer you one tiny but typical example.
Readers may recall that this site is engaged in an ongoing attempt to clarify why the Scottish justice system is choosing to selectively only pursue those supportive of Alex Salmond for contempt of court with regard to his trial, while conspicuously turning a blind eye to those in the media who have committed exactly the same crime but are hostile to Mr Salmond and therefore apparently immune from prosecution.
During that investigation we received a reply from Police Scotland last month stating that contempt of court is in fact not a criminal offence in Scots law (although you can be tried and imprisoned for it), and so is nothing to do with them, and that they only act in relation to contempt when instructed by the courts or the Crown Office.
So naturally we asked them if they had been so instructed.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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