Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish Parliament website has just published a letter from Peter Murrell following his appearance at the Salmond inquiry yesterday.

The media is focusing on Murrell’s continued evasion of the question of his WhatsApp usage (Murrell bizarrely states he has several messaging apps installed on his phone but uses none of them), but there’s a much more interesting revelation in the second of the letter’s two sections.

This is a direct, unambiguous and categorical statement from the First Minister that the investigation into the false allegations against Salmond was a Scottish Government matter that was absolutely nothing to do with the SNP.

Her failure to record the use of her private office at the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issue on 29 March 2018 (despite repeated denials that such a thing happened at all), and to take minutes of that discussion and of subsequent meetings at her home to consider the issue, and her numerous statements that the matter was private party business (now revealed by Murrell to be false) are all therefore indisputably breaches of the Ministerial Code.

The net draws ever tighter.

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We got this email last night.

And, y’know, that’s really not good enough, folks.

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Alert readers will recall the deranged open letter released by a group of transactivists last Friday, in a nakedly transparent attempt to influence the SNP’s NEC elections that weekend which backfired on them horribly (and amusingly) when the party’s members instead kicked out three-quarters of the committee’s woke faction and replaced them with feminists, socialists and above all advocates of actually achieving independence.

But things just got rather more interesting.

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The Scottish Parliament will today almost certainly pass a dangerously misleading and inaccurate motion to mark “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, and in doing so will join countless other institutions across the UK captured by trans ideology to the great detriment of women’s rights, freedom of speech and general sanity.

So we thought we’d mark it with a very short fact check.

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As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.

One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.

(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)

So let’s see what we know.

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The SNP has still not provided any sort of meaningful answer, either to this site or to anyone else, over the missing £600,000 from the party’s accounts that was supposedly “ring-fenced” for a future independence campaign and not under any circumstances to be spent on normal party politics.

Enquiries from members and even elected representatives have met with a wall of silence for months, so we were more than a little surprised to be forwarded a recent email exchange in which the SNP’s chief executive had engaged in discussion on the subject with someone who isn’t even in the party.

We thought you’d be interested in reading it.

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We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.

So here’s this week’s.

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We have to admit the line below takes some chutzpah to even attempt. It’s a little bit like Harold Shipman refusing to admit to all the murders he committed on the grounds that revealing the victim/patients’ personal data would break the Hippocratic Oath.

We know, for an absolute and uncontested fact, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, that the First Minister has already committed the most serious breach of the Ministerial Code possible – lying to Parliament (section 1.3c). She lied about the date she first knew of the allegations against Salmond.

From the First Minister’s own personal written testimony, we know that the reason she lied to Parliament was that she had definitely also committed another breach of the Code, either by using Scottish Parliament premises for party matters (section 1.3i) or by failing to record government business discussed therein (sections 4.22, 4.23).

So it seems a bit late to be getting all bashful about the Code now.

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TO: Colin Beattie MSP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 28 October 2020

Dear Colin,

I note that today you’ve sent an email to SNP members on the contentious topic of the party’s supposedly “ring-fenced” referendum campaign fund, which we’ve learned for the first time today has a grand official name – the Referendum Appeal Fund (which from here on we’ll call the RAF for short).

The email also contains some rather offensive implied smears about my website and myself, but I’m quite used to being abused on the internet so I’ll let that slide. As we’re both on the side of Scottish independence, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match I thought I’d try to reach a constructive consensus.

I notice that in your email you invite people who have “any questions” on the subject to contact you without hesitation, and while I’m not a member of the party I believe I do speak for a considerable number of people who are, so it would likely also save you a lot of tedious copy-and-pasting if you replied publicly to me as their representative.

(And because, y’know, if you don’t then you’ll probably get about a thousand individual emails from members containing the text below anyway, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time.)

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It was my birthday yesterday, readers. (Late presents still accepted. The cheapest one is fine.) I got taken out to lunch and there was someone’s new kitten to play with, but mostly what flooded in wasn’t birthday cards but new scandal about the SNP.

It’s hard to know where to even start tackling the avalanche of new information. There were extraordinary revelations from the Salmond inquiry. There were other shocking revelations about the investigation. There was Alex Salmond’s request for the separate independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon to determine whether she lied to Parliament (which it should have been doing in the first place).

We’ll get to all that stuff in due course. But because there’s nothing like a good delve through some data, we’ll kick off with the SNP accounts.

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The Electoral Commission has finally published the SNP’s 2019 accounts.

As Wings has been warning for most of this year, something in the region of £700,000 in supposedly “ring-fenced” money raised by two crowdfunding campaigns has indeed vanished into the maw of the party machine, leaving just under £97,000 in the bank.

(More than £300,000 down on last year, despite a £600,000 increase in “donations”, the bulk of which in fact came from the UK government).

This has happened despite the party angrily and categorically insisting that the money would NOT be spent until there was a new independence referendum.

What all that means is that if the UK government were to unexpectedly turn round tomorrow and grant a Section 30 order for a second indyref, Wings Over Scotland would have considerably more money in the bank to fight it than the SNP does.

The SNP also has a Holyrood election to fight in six months’ time, which normally costs it somewhere in the region of £1.5m – far more than its current total net assets of £272,000. As we told you back in January, the party is simply in no financial position to fight a new referendum campaign, which is very likely part of the reason it’s been in no rush to secure one for the last few years and has no remotely credible plan to do so.

It’s a matter of debate whether obtaining such sums of money under false pretences is a criminal offence or not. We invite anyone concerned about this state of affairs to ask the SNP what happened to their donation. We wish you good luck getting an answer.

At the weekend we made a half-joke about who’d be counting the votes in the SNP’s candidate elections to determine who’d be standing for Holyrood next year.

The joke just got a bit less funny.

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