Wings Over Scotland

Over the last year or so, this site’s commentary on matters surrounding the attempted imprisonment of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse has attracted a considerable amount of ire from a section of the readership, demanding “proof” of the involvement of the current First Minister.

Such proof has been impossible to provide for legal reasons. But it’s always been the case that the truth could only be suppressed for so long, and events in recent days have brought the first chinks of light through the wall of smoke and mirrors the Scottish Government has been attempting to surround the matter with.

So in our very lightest and softest shoes, let’s tiptoe through what is both a labyrinth and a minefield and see if we can make some of it a little easier to understand.

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There’s a good column by Kevin McKenna in today’s Herald On Sunday about Boris Johnson, from which this paragraph in particular jumped out at us.

It did so because of something else we’d just read this weekend.

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On 17 January last year, the First Minister told the Scottish Parliament that she, her administration and her party would “co-operate fully” with the parliamentary inquiry into the Scottish Government’s handling of false allegations made against Alex Salmond.

She further assured the Parliament, unambiguously and without any qualification, that the committee investigating the matter “will be able to request whatever material they want, and I undertake today that we will provide whatever material they request”.

So just over a month in, we thought we’d check on how that was going so far.

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We suppose we should be happy to learn that Scottish Government ministers are at least still sometimes capable of understanding that men and women are different and there are times when it’s inappropriate for men to be in women’s spaces.

We just wish they didn’t keep reminding us of something so much.

We really hope the 27% of Scots who already think the Sun revolves around the Earth isn’t getting bigger.

The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.

“What you’re saying is a man can try to kiss a woman, or he can say completely inappropriate things to her, when he’s 30 years older than her and he’s the First Minister of Scotland.

I’m worried about what this says more widely to other women, or just to us as a society. I mean, where does this leave us?”

Now, since the court found that neither of those things actually happened, the logical answer in that person’s case ought surely to be “facing prosecution for perjury”. But readers will be astonished to learn that that isn’t where the show went.

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We have written yet again, wearily and with little hope of a meaningful response, to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, a body with the power to destroy people’s lives but which appears to be answerable to no-one.

The letter is attached below.

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Alert readers will be aware of very considerable recent active involvement by Police Scotland in matters relating to alleged contempt of court with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond. A blog in April by Craig Murray gave some details.

So we were extremely surprised by a letter we received this week.

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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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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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Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.

Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!

But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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