Wings Over Scotland

Having never been part of a political party, an area where Wings lacks expertise is in understanding the nuts and bolts of their operation, and how a party’s rules can be used to usurp their members’ power. We’re delighted to have someone equipped to provide a valuable insight into how that’s happened to the SNP in the last two years.

The following line is still a definitive statement in the SNP constitution:

“National Conference is the supreme governing and policy-making body of the Party.”

But in practice it is no longer the case. The 2018 redraft of the constitution centralised power in the Leader and in the NEC. The party Leader has sole and total power over policy – both in the manifesto and in government – and the NEC has sole power over who represents the party and what they are allowed to say.

So in effect, since 2018 the party elite – not the membership – has ruled the SNP.

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Yesterday was Wings’ biggest day of traffic in January – something which was no small beer, because January was this site’s busiest month for traffic since June 2017. The majority of it was down to one story – our shocking scoop about the incredibly shady goings-on earlier that day at a meeting of the SNP’s National Executive Council.

The reaction to it was absolutely explosive. Half of the Parliamentary SNP spent the whole night running around social media frantically firefighting their own members, who were absolutely furious about what they’d just discovered. Poisonous abuse from the party’s woke faction poured out like never before. We got called every kind of bigot under the sun by SNP officeholders.

(The article, of course, made no mention of any sort of bisexual people, Jewish people, trans people or women as a group, let alone actually being prejudiced against anyone. Ironically just about the only kind of prejudice that wasn’t alleged was ageism, possibly because it might have looked a smidge too ironic coming from a bunch of bedwetting children whose core ideological stance is that anyone over 29 is a Nazi.)

But there was one thing you DIDN’T read amid the torrents of hate.

You didn’t read anyone saying a single word of the post was untrue.

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So we’ve just heard some news hot from the SNP’s controversial special NEC meeting which took place this afternoon.

We don’t yet know what happened regarding the supposed definition of transphobia – our source thinks that it may have been postponed due to not being able to get the required 2/3 vote for an emergency agenda item.

But we know that something even madder DID happen.

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“If voting made a difference they wouldn’t let you do it” is one of many quotes that are regularly misattributed to Mark Twain.

However, the sentiment could very much be used to sum up the current management of the Scottish National Party.

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When we saw this a few days ago, we wondered what they wanted to hide.

And now we know.

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This is quite extraordinary:

Because what it amounts to is “Oh, if I have to tell the truth then I’m not coming”.

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As we write this, we still wait for Scotland’s hopelessly compromised Lord Advocate to decide whether he, as John Swinney has already done twice, will refuse to obey the will of the Scottish Parliament by releasing data demanded by the Fabiani inquiry.

We suspect he’ll surprise everyone and the information WILL be released, because according to analysis by Craig Murray it’s actually completely useless, and the Scottish Government has undeniably been red-hot when it comes to deluging the committee with vast screeds of junk documentation it hasn’t asked for and doesn’t want.

By coincidence, that same Craig Murray will go on trial in Edinburgh tomorrow for his liberty, for the crime of allegedly telling readers of his blog the truth about the shameful failed conspiracy to imprison Alex Salmond for crimes he didn’t commit – a conspiracy, remarkably, for which nobody has yet been held to account in any way despite the most obvious of grounds for suspicion of perjury, and which the Scottish Government is still frenziedly trying to conceal.

Speaking of liars, we thought it was probably time to update the list below.

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It’s hard to keep up with developments in Scottish politics these days, readers. We told you January 2021 was going to be a pivotal and explosive month but there’s been more going on than even we expected, and that’s despite the fact that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon’s appearances before the Fabiani committee now both look like being pushed back to February.

So our apologies if we have to give some things rather more cursory coverage than they might ordinarily merit, or cram several stories into one post. For example, we’re just going to link you to solicitor advocate Gordon Dangerfield’s appearance yesterday on the Tommy Sheridan podcast, even though he said this non-trivial thing on it:

“There’s a very simple answer to [why Leslie Evans is still in a job]. She says it herself constantly to the inquiry – civil servants only represent ministers. They have no status other than as the servants of the government.

Who is Leslie Evans’ boss? Leslie Evans’ boss is Nicola Sturgeon. Nicola Sturgeon was behind this from the outset. Leslie Evans was carrying out Nicola Sturgeon’s instructions. And that’s why she’s still in a job. Because if she wasn’t still in a job, neither would Nicola Sturgeon be.”

The whole interview is pretty unmissable, so if you can find 24 spare minutes in your day try to give it a listen. But there’s more.

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Sky News had a breaking report tonight about a person they couldn’t name.

Was it The Woman Whose Name You Can’t Say? We couldn’t tell you even if we knew, readers. And we can’t tell you whether we do or not. Sky carefully avoided even saying what sex the person was, and you’d have to be quite an alert viewer to notice any of the hints they dropped in the piece. We’ve said enough. You’re on your own now.

As ever, please do not commit contempt of court in the comments.

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You can say what you want about the Scottish Government, the Crown Office and the civil service [IMPORTANT LAWYER’S NOTE: NO YOU MOST DEFINITELY CAN’T], but there’s certainly no faulting their reaction time.

That was less than eight hours, for example. Great work, team.

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This is definitely fine and not at all suspicious.

Geoff Aberdein is the man whose evidence could destroy the First Minister. We know he’s already told the High Court under oath that he had a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon on 29 March 2018 to discuss the Salmond affair.

Sturgeon claims otherwise, saying he just popped in for a friendly hello while seeing someone else, and that the meeting – which the Scottish Government had repeatedly denied ever happened at all, until it suddenly changed its mind and admitted it last August – was so inconsequential that she forgot about it entirely for almost a year, which is why she’d told Parliament in January 2019 that it didn’t exist.

Which of those accounts is correct will determine whether the First Minister was lying to Parliament deliberately and whether she has to resign under the Ministerial Code.

But now, not only will Aberdein – the single most important figure in the entire inquiry – NOT be called as a witness, but the public will not be allowed to see even a redacted version of his written testimony so that they can judge who’s telling the truth.

What conceivable reason could there be for that? How could either “The meeting was arranged in advance and we talked about the allegations” or “I was in visiting someone else and just popped my head round the door briefly to say hi” ever need to be a state secret the Scottish public mustn’t know? And yet it is.

No cover-up here, folks. All open and transparent and above board. There’s definitely nothing going on that the Scottish Government desperately wants to hide from you. It’s all fine. Ssssshhhh, now. Sssshhhh for Nicola like good little boys and girls. Write another of your nice wee blogs about how Boris Johnson will just give in for no reason and independence is inevitable. But no questions. Definitely no questions.

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