Wings Over Scotland

As alert readers will have noticed, Wings has been perusing the SNP’s Governance And Transparency Review over the last couple of days, a document which tentatively attempts to discern just how big a mess the party’s previous leadership has left it in.

(SPOILER: a really big one.)

The paper has now also reached the mainstream media.

Wings already touched on that particular aspect of the party’s mismanagement back in August, but in the light of the report now formally acknowledging the problem it’s worth taking a moment to establish just how astonishingly bad it is.

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The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.

And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.

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The Scottish National Party, in legal character, is what’s known as an unincorporated association. (The same form of entity as Wings, local colour fans.)

This has a number of interesting ramifications.

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So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.

It’s smaller than we imagined.

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Readers may have been baffled by a news story yesterday, in which an event where two men insulted each other in the street (“Deviant!”, “Bigot!”) has led to one of them, but not the other, being arrested and charged with an unspecified crime by police.

In particular, many people on social media have contrasted the situation with one from a month ago, when a large male transactivist violently assaulted a feminist woman at a “Women Won’t Wheesht” meeting in Aberdeen but merely received a recorded warning rather than being arrested and charged.

So we’re very grateful to Roddy Dunlop KC, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates (the “trade” body of Scotland’s senior barristers), for posting an extremely informative, and disturbing, summary of the relevant laws on Twitter this morning.

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This is a Sunday Mail cover story today:

And it’s almost easy to dismiss it as meaningless. You can report to the police that aliens dug up your prize petunias and they’ll record it and give it a reference number and promise to investigate, before concluding that it was actually the neighbour’s cat.

But there’s one word in the 500-word piece that makes it much more interesting.

Can you spot it, readers?

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Yesterday we took an extensive tour of all the red flags in the SNP’s 2022 accounts, which show a party in very deep financial trouble. But there was one part we left out because it deserves a post of its own.

The picture above – which was posted by then-CEO Peter Murrell during last year’s SNP conference – is a revealing one in all kinds of ways.

It starkly exposes how a party chose to hold an event for around 800 members in a venue with a capacity of 15,000 and then went to a lot of effort to disguise how empty the space was, rather than, for example, just hiring somewhere of an appropriate size (and cost) in the first place.

(Look how far into the hall the stage has been placed, leaving half the arena vacant, to then be hidden behind a giant screen and curtains and banners in order to give a false impression of how full it is.)

But what’s more symbolic is that there are almost no people in it.

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We know the meanings of words are very flexible these days, especially in the SNP.

But this isn’t our understanding of the term “turning around”:

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Even not-very-alert readers will have noticed that we’re taking a little summer holiday in the complete absence of any political events. Rest assured that we’re using the time to patrol Bath diligently for bears. But we couldn’t help noticing this on Twitter today.

Someone tweeted it to show that as late as summer 2020 the SNP was still soliciting money for what it called its “ring fenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund”.

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Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella.

And not just for the obvious reason.

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As a corollary to this piece from earlier today, here’s a nice simple picture.

Alert readers will already have spotted the problem with it.

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This is, strictly speaking, semantically, true:

It is, however, as the famous phrase goes, not the whole truth.

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