When the Faculty Of Advocates – the most senior body of lawyers/QCs in the country – is handing out barely-veiled smackdowns like this to the First Minister, then you know you’re in some pretty uncharted jungle.
I had hoped that Stewart Stevenson, the new National Secretary and convener of the Conferences Committee, would be similarly inclined.
In summary, my endeavours have been ignored.
In the three months since our election (supposedly more than halfway towards a spring conference), and despite repeated emails, documents and requests for meetings, the Conferences Committee has never been convened.
As a result I have resigned from both the committee and the SNP, and the reasons for my doing so are outlined below.
For the record, we thought you should see what the Scottish Parliament considers to be the appropriate treatment of an “Urgent Question”.
For a little over eight minutes, the Lord Advocate was allowed to ignore and avoid a series of questions put to him regarding the abjectly corrupt Crown Office’s recent interference with the work of the Fabiani inquiry by redacting evidence which in no way identified anyone as a complainer in the trial of Alex Salmond.
If we can somehow find the time amid the relentless blizzard of current Scottish political activity, we’re going to put together a list of all the legitimate and important questions that Alex Salmond’s lawyers have asked the Fabiani inquiry which haven’t even had the courtesy of a reply, let alone a satisfactory one.
We fully anticipate that the contents of the letter below, sent today, will be on that list.
It really can’t be overstated what extraordinary tweets these are.
That’s the editor of the conservative, ultra-establishment Spectator openly linking to a document that the Crown Office – the agent of the Queen herself – has threatened to prosecute the Scottish Parliament for publishing, and which has officially been deleted but is for some reason actually still available on the Parliament’s website.
The Spectator is giving the Queen the finger. And that’s not even the mad bit.
The Scottish Government and Nicola Sturgeon have tonight embarked on a last-ditch desperate throw of the dice to undermine and sabotage the already-compromised and endlessly-obstructed Fabiani inquiry in its impossible quest for the truth.
Having previously deployed her paid mouthpiece Rape Crisis Scotland last week, the First Minister – who’s spent the last six months insisting that she’d save her comments for her appearance at the inquiry – suddenly popped up on BBC and STV (but not, curiously, Sky News) to issue a challenge full of gunfighter bravado to her predecessor.
As a spinoff from the hysterical Scottish media witch-hunt over last week’s piece on Neil Mackay, today we found ourselves listening to a podcast from last May by Courier editor Davie Clegg and former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale.
While it was obviously of personal interest, we had a specific reason for listening – we suspected it might contain some helpful information that our lawyers had been looking for (which as it happened it did).
But there was also something else really interesting that we weren’t expecting.
It’s difficult to know where to even start on the absolutely extraordinary reaction to our post about yesterday’s meeting of the SNP National Executive Committee. Our traffic exploded to levels not seen since 2014, racking up tens of thousands of pageviews an hour, and social media was aflame with argument into the small hours of the morning.
A whole raft of issues arose from our exclusive revelations, but the one we want to talk about now is the one that was buried at the bottom of what a panicked SNP hastily and laughably produced as the “minutes” of the meeting, and we didn’t even notice it until a couple of hours after the original post.
Two weeks ago a Wings scoop caused quite a furore to erupt around the SNP’s ham-fisted and corruptly-motivated attempts to increase BAME and disabled representation at this year’s Holyrood election.
We’ve always been opposed to what were until recently known as “quotas”, and prior to that “positive discrimination”, but have now been cunningly rebranded as “diversity and inclusion” because that’s a much more difficult thing to say you object to.
It’s easy to make an honourable-sounding case against any form of “discrimination”, because decent and civilised people are taught to automatically think of discrimination as a bad thing, even if you put “positive” in front of it.
So the word “quotas” was adopted to move the concept from a pejorative term to a neutral noun – objecting to “quotas” doesn’t sound intolerant, any more than objecting to (say) “procedures” does. So that’s fine, because you can still discuss it like adults without too much unpleasantness.
But those pushing the agenda got smarter still by changing the name again. If you say you object to “diversity and inclusion”, you sound like a monster and a racist, because diversity and inclusion are plainly good things – no decent person wants to live in a monoculture, or to exclude anybody from society – and so the debate is immediately drowned out by self-righteous tossers screaming “BIGOT!” and “NAZI!” at everyone.
And yet in the context of social policy the three phrases mean the exact same thing. They’re all systems for overriding raw democracy so as to increase the representation of selected groups at the expense of other groups, for one reason or another.
(Sometimes it’s ostensibly just penance for historical wrongs, while at other times it’s supposedly for economic benefits, and so on.)
And while the proponents of those systems will openly argue that the only group being disadvantaged is straight white men so it’s all fine (because nobody likes straight white men and anyone standing up for them can be easily dismissed as a “gammon” for lots of woke points and Twitter likes), it isn’t even remotely close to the truth.
Because in “diversity and inclusion”, some groups are a lot more included than others.
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “So you love Ross for his BANANA politics Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone I hate the wee turd but…” Apr 5, 14:09
sarah on Mad caps: “That’s a good selection, George. We thought the handbag was a whoopee cushion!” Apr 5, 14:05
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “More like Lavernetiy Beria.” Apr 5, 13:56
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “Sorry not interested in any country that easyJet doesn’t fly to.” Apr 5, 13:55
Sven on Mad caps: “Yoon Scum @ 12.40. To be frank, I can’t really speculate what Mr Greer would rather do than spend money…” Apr 5, 13:19
dandydons1903 on Mad caps: “The homo histrionic Heinrich Himmler lookalike will be missed for his comical but very revealing green fascism. But not much…” Apr 5, 13:09
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “Gaddafi would be a better prospect then the Scottish greens” Apr 5, 13:09
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “You have nicely side stepped my point leaving the control of the English doesn’t instantly equal paradise If it does…” Apr 5, 13:02
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “You guys really like jumping back and forward a couple of hundred years to make your argument hold. If you…” Apr 5, 13:02
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “We can safely ignore all unionist parties as they are nothing more then far right scottish hating English worshipping tools…” Apr 5, 12:44
TURABDIN on Mad caps: “Yoon Scum 10:11 UTOPIAS, as the name implies do not exist in reality, however the former American colonies have done…” Apr 5, 12:44
yoon scum on Mad caps: “Both of us are trying to pick up the turd by the clean end I’d far rather we had politicians…” Apr 5, 12:40
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “Mark Ruskell another graduate groupie. Another Ponce on the Vine. SCOTLAND NEEDS ADULTS!! Stop the graduate brat mafia destroying our…” Apr 5, 12:25
Old John on Mad caps: “A veritable tombola of hats. I’m a trifle confused as to who would wear the Roundhead or Cavalier ones though.…” Apr 5, 12:08
George Ferguson on Mad caps: “@ Sarah Tin Foil Hat Ross Greer Black YMCA hat Patrick Harvie Trans Hat Maggie Chapman Dunce Hat Lorna Slater…” Apr 5, 12:05
Mark Beggan on Mad caps: “Sums up the freak show nicely.” Apr 5, 12:04
Skip_NC on Mad caps: “I should have thought it was obvious that, after independence, the constitutional question goes away almost completely. So parties and…” Apr 5, 11:50
Anthem on Mad caps: “That’s the thing. You can’t! They sneek in through the list system.” Apr 5, 11:37
Rev. Stuart Campbell on Mad caps: “Nobody voted “on mass” for the Greens. They got 8% on the list.” Apr 5, 11:23
sarah on Mad caps: “Had me laughing out loud, Chris – many thanks! Have you allotted specific mad hats to Mad Hatters? Which ones…” Apr 5, 11:17
Peter Glasgow on Mad caps: “We could also vote Scottish MP’s out if they’re sh*t/grifters/wrong uns etc” Apr 5, 10:46
Sven on Mad caps: “I’m not so sure that “happily” advocating spending public money in a foreign country to add to its infrastructure is…” Apr 5, 10:36
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “America left control of the English in 1775 Seeing that the vital element in achieving utopia is leaving control of…” Apr 5, 10:11
Yoon Scum on Mad caps: “if you want me to defend the Labour MPs who want to BUILD an airport in Pakistan when compared to…” Apr 5, 10:09
Cynicus on Mad caps: “How about this one? https://tinyurl.com/ClownBowler” Apr 5, 10:09
Andrew scott on Mad caps: “Maggie chapperson or dross geer-what a prospect” Apr 5, 10:05
Sven on Mad caps: “Yoon Scum @ 08.53. Reads a wee bit like that song about, “What do you with a pronlem like Greer.”.…” Apr 5, 09:52
TURABDIN on Mad caps: “IN PAX AMERICANA à la Trump/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg etc they know the price of everything, flash the greenbacks and all prostrate in…” Apr 5, 09:51
diabloandco on Mad caps: “And American chocolate, American sitcoms ( or is that the cheese to which you refer?) and Trump , Musk et…” Apr 5, 09:45
Former President Xiden on The Gender Of Mountains: “Meetings, the practical alternative to work.” Apr 5, 09:38