Wings Over Scotland

Last week we dropped the Electoral Commission a short line to see if there’d been any progress in their investigation into our revelations of last December about the extremist loongroup Scotland In Union’s funding. Today we got a reply:

So just to clarify: an organisation whose specific stated purpose is to fight elections, and which has been a registered campaigner in several general elections, spending tens of thousands of pounds at a time, has raised over £600,000 in mainly large donations from wealthy and secretive donors since 2015 – a period where there has hardly ever NOT been an election going on in which spending and donations were regulated – and yet not one single penny of it has been declarable income.

That’s… interesting. We’ve asked the EC if any further detail will be forthcoming.

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This is a grim and dispiriting time to be monitoring the Scottish political media, even by its normal low standards. So little is happening that Unionist newspapers desperate for any kind of SNP BAD story are scraping the residue from the scrapings from the barrel that they scraped away to splinters months ago.

A case in point is today’s FRONT-PAGE piece in the Herald containing the shocking revelation that someone connected with the SNP registered – in their own name, not even the party’s – an internet domain called organise.scot last summer.

Even though the domain is still unused eight months later and there isn’t a shred of evidence about what it might ever be used for, a couple of opposition benchwarmers speculating that a private individual registering a web domain must somehow prove that the sneaky SNP are plotting a new independence campaign was considered by the Herald to be not just news, but front-page news.

(It’ll certainly come as a massive shock to everyone in Scotland who assumed that the SNP had given up on seeking independence after pursuing it as their primary reason for existence for a mere 85 years or so.)

And alarmingly, it wasn’t even the stupidest piece of Nat-bashing to appear in the Scottish press in the last 48 hours.

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A new Scottish Labour propaganda website called The Red Robin attracted some attention at the weekend by claiming that new polling had shown Labour closing the Westminster voting gap on the SNP to just 4 points.

To try to lend some credibility to this rather dubious assertion – the SNP’s average lead is currently around 15 points – it pointed out that the polling company’s owner was the Vice-Chair of the British Polling Council.

Readers would quite reasonably infer from that that Moonlight Research was a BPC member, and BPC rules state that if figures from a poll enter the public domain, the full data tables concerning those figures have to be released within 48 hours so that people can scrutinise them and ensure that the methodology (sample size, weighting, question wording etc) is fully up to scratch and above board.

So since the blog post is now five days old, we dropped Moonlight a line asking if we could see them, and quickly got an interesting reply.

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So it seems we opened quite a can of worms when we broke the story of the Scotland In Union donor leak last month. Yesterday saw the disturbing tale of police armed with battering rams seizing computers and phones from David Clews of right-wing Unionist group UK Unity, a former SIU member suspected of being the source of the leak.

For the record we have absolutely no idea if he’s the source or not (and we don’t know who is – the file was passed to us anonymously through a now-deleted email account), but however much of a mad zoomer someone might be we find ourselves rather uncomfortable with the deployment of such an excessive display of intimidatory police force in the defence of the interests of the wealthy establishment.

Clews might be a Unionist – and a fairly unpalatable one at that – but we very much doubt it was ever going to be necessary to smash his door down, and it’s striking to see the magnitude of the state’s reaction against one of its own the moment they might step out of line and do anything to displease either the titled and landed gentry who provide most of SIU’s money, or their loyal bootboys.

So having been subjected to a ridiculous arrest (and completely spurious, months-long confiscation of electronic equipment) ourselves last year for doing our job, we didn’t view the raid with quite as much schadenfreude as readers might expect.

But it wasn’t the most disturbing thing to arise from the story.

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Alert readers may recall as far back as November, when we ran an article on a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail hatchet job which claimed that “the SNP has squandered £2bn” in its ten years in office, but only actually listed around £800m in supposed waste.

The independent press regulator IPSO is still in a great big sulking strop with us for reasons we can’t remember, so rejects any complaints that come directly from Wings, but the good thing about having a 300,000-strong army of readers is that some kind soul will usually take on the task for us.

And this one turned out to be fascinating.

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We thought it might be worth going through this in a bit more detail.

The phrase “out of control” is in quote marks in the Herald’s front-page headline, leading readers to believe someone has said it, but who? Let’s investigate.

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Below is a letter that we sent this week to the Electoral Commission.

We thought you might be interested in it.

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Readers, have you ever noticed how the letters pages of Scottish newspapers are full every day of the same names, a clutch of a couple of dozen super-hardcore frothing ultra-Yoons tirelessly and reflexively raging against independence, the SNP and pretty much anything without a Union Jack on it?

Have you ever found yourself thinking it must be some sort of co-ordinated group that gets together, plans topics in advance then writes in backing each other up, to create an illusion of speaking for a wide cross-section of society, before dismissing that idea as a daft paranoid conspiracy and getting on with your day?

Because we thought that too, until an alert reader infiltrated it.

Our very favourite bit is “we must not advertise the existence of the group. It can be mentioned verbally, in safe environment, that some people share letters/encourage each other, but anything more risks editors discriminating, nationalists reacting, and this diverse group being portrayed as a monolithic campaign”.

Probably don’t put it in an email, then. But your secret’s safe with us, lads.

Readers, meet Eric Simpson.

He’s a fervent Tory, and the Secretary of Inverurie Community Council. He tweets as “ElginLoon59”, and as a busy pillar of the local community he’s got some pretty firm views on the sort of people who should and shouldn’t hold public office.

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The efforts by the Scottish Tories to pull off some frankly ambitious shenanigans over today’s Budget continued overnight in increasingly bizarre fashion.

As with the Poppy Scotland funding, the party appears to be quite openly punting the line “We knew all along that this was possible and the right thing to do, but we deliberately punished Scotland for not electing enough Tory MPs”, in what can only be reasonably interpreted as an attempt at blackmailing future electorates.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is doing its best to sell the issue as “a plague on both their houses”, holding the Scottish Government and UK government equally culpable for the mess. So let’s see what we know.

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This documentary starts a little slowly, but becomes an eye-opening case study of how Labour steamrollered through crippling PFI contracts to build public infrastructure on the never-never when they ran the Scottish Executive from 1999-2007.

We highly recommend giving it a watch.