The SNP’s official 2019 accounts, which were due to be published today (five weeks late), have not appeared on the Electoral Commission website. We’ve rung the EC and we’re still waiting for someone to get back to us with a reason and/or a new date.
[EDIT 3pm: the EC say they’re “fairly confident” the new date will be 23 September.]
An alert viewer noticed this evening that after being broadcast twice in two days, “The Trial Of Alex Salmond” has tonight disappeared from BBC iPlayer.
In a development which has caught us somewhat by surprise, we’ve just had a reply from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) which was both timely (in more than one sense of the word) and actually contained a straight answer.
There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about the SNP NEC, the rather secretive body that controls the operation of the party (and therefore also in effect the Scottish Government).
Extraordinarily, even if you’re a party member there’s no way to access a full list of the 42-member committee – something which for pretty obvious reasons of basic political transparency and accountability ought to be recorded prominently on the SNP website, let alone available to rank-and-file members.
(Ordinary party members aren’t even permitted to see the minutes of NEC meetings, which are restricted to NEC members.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new World Speed-Reading Champion:
Almost 1200 words in 15 seconds is mighty impressive going in anyone’s book. (Either that or it’s REALLY slow for a 12-word tweet.) But we wondered if there might be any other reason why Mrs Angus Robertson wouldn’t want people reading that article.
We’ve just been out for our evening constitutional in the relatively cool night air (Bath sweltered at an oppressive 30C today and Bear Patrol was pretty gruelling), and we thought readers might be interested in what we saw.
The city has observed lockdown with great diligence, as we’ve previously documented, and to be honest we’re not sufficiently familiar with the latest rules to say it wasn’t still doing so tonight. But a nearby park, around 9.30pm, was a disconcerting scene.
We’ve often said on Wings Over Scotland that we really don’t mind if journalists are biased. Everyone is biased, including us – we’d just rather people stopped pretending to be impartial when they weren’t. But what we do really hate about the Scottish media is just how astonishingly bad at its job it is.
A particularly striking example arose recently.
Pretty much every newspaper and broadcaster in the country carried the sad story of former Labour MP Paul Sweeney‘s fall from besuited lawmaker to skint benefits claimant. And yet not a single one of them asked the question that literally every single reader of the story would have been shouting at their screen.
