Wings Over Scotland

So this was a bit odd.

Once again we’ve clipped the entire question and “answer” so you can see nothing’s been taken out of context, but the important bit is from 2m 30s to 2m 53s.

Davidson’s question was quite complex but boiled down to why Nicola Sturgeon hadn’t properly recorded details and minutes of meetings on Scottish Government business, in direct breach of the Ministerial Code.

That’s a valid question in itself, to which there was no meaningful response, but it was what Sturgeon said right at the end that raised our eyebrows.

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Iain Macwhirter has a good column on the farcical Fabiani inquiry in the Herald today. But one piece of it really jumped out at us.

Wait, what?

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Do ye, aye?

Well, yer ontae plums, son.

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Sorry, folks, we had a minor medical emergency today (veteran readers can probably guess in which category) and haven’t been quite as on top of events as we’d like.

We did, however, watch the astonishing fiasco of Peter Murrell’s second “evidence” session before the Fabiani inquiry, at which he basically refused to answer any serious questions from the four Unionist members, convener Linda Fabiani ran interference, the SNP members lobbed him a few timewasting softballs in the inexplicably-rushed one-hour session, and independent member Andy Wightman didn’t say a single word.

So terrible was it that the SNP had a backup plan to distract from it – a nonsense of a press release from SNP chief operating officer Sue Ruddick in which she made an allegation about a supposed “act of physical aggression” by Alex Salmond.

The following statement has been issued in response. It’s an eye-opener.

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The Scottish Government seems determined to pile insult upon injury to the Scottish people in relation to the inquiry into its botched stitch-up of Alex Salmond.

A shocking story in today’s Sunday Mail reveals that in addition to wasting in excess of £1 million on the initial unlawful investigation, untold millions on a criminal prosecution and trial, and £55,000 on coaching its inquiry witnesses (so badly that almost all of them were forced to return to the inquiry to subsequently “correct” their evidence), it’s also spent thousands of pounds of your money on lawyers to successfully prevent one of the key witnesses appearing at all.

Possibly because the witness in question doesn’t exist.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s barely six months since grassroots SNP members rushed to the defence of Glasgow Cathcart MSP James Dornan when it looked like the party’s woke wing had pushed him out of his seat for electoral vampire Rhiannon Spear.

The loud uproar over a crooked NEC meeting that effectively deselected Dornan – the same one that stitched up Joanna Cherry – saw him reinstated as candidate, although the decision over Cherry wasn’t reversed. But the warning shot across Dornan’s bows clearly worked, because look at the state of him now.

Ever since the summer fiasco Dornan has been the most obsequiously loyal follower of the leadership in the entire party, but today’s tweet is a new low.

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At a certain point you just have to laugh, even though it’s not really funny.

The submission being referred to is NOT the one Alex Salmond sent to the Holyrood committee this week, but the one he sent to the separate Hamilton inquiry almost a month ago, which had been cleared by his lawyers and was published in full by both Wings and The Spectator and read by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.

(For reasons we’re not allowed to tell you, the Wings version has been totally redacted and the Spectator’s has had one paragraph removed but is still mostly intact.)

Because the Fabiani inquiry won’t be publishing the document, that means Salmond isn’t allowed to discuss it when he gives oral evidence, and the inquiry isn’t permitted to consider any of its contents, just as with Geoff Aberdein’s submission.

(There’s very little Salmond actually WILL now be allowed to talk about if he appears before the committee. He might just about be able to confirm his name before the Lord Advocate has him arrested and charged with whatever the opposite of perjury is.)

In other words, the exact people who are supposed to be getting to the bottom of what happened are the only people in Scotland who have to pretend they haven’t read the evidence of the primary witness. (While also not being allowed to see the evidence of the other most important witness, or almost anything else.)

You really would struggle to make this stuff up, readers.

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We’re feeling a bit confused this morning, readers. Maybe someone can help.

Below is the key part of the letter sent by the Clerks of the Scottish Parliament, acting on behalf of the Fabiani committee, to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) a week and a half ago, requesting material for their investigation into the Scottish Government’s botched handling of false allegations against Alex Salmond.

As we’d told you at the time, the request was a sham, designed to produce nothing of any value, because it carefully excluded the only person whose communications with Sue Ruddick were actually of relevance – SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.

(Murrell being an employee of the party, NOT a member of the Scottish Government, a civil servant or a special adviser.)

But yesterday it all went really weird.

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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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