Glory days 242
Posted on
October 10, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.
And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.
Archive for the ‘investigation’
The washing of the hands 289
Posted on
September 20, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
To Another World 220
Posted on
September 03, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.
It’s smaller than we imagined.
How Scotland Hates Women 137
Posted on
August 31, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
The Lasting Effect Of A Single Word 93
Posted on
August 27, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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?
The Hollow Heart 192
Posted on
August 25, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Dead Cat Bouncing 58
Posted on
August 24, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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”:
The murmur of the cottonwood trees 89
Posted on
July 20, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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”.
Ruined In A Day 219
Posted on
July 03, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Fun with numbers 35
Posted on
June 30, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Fun with words 61
Posted on
June 30, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This is, strictly speaking, semantically, true:
It is, however, as the famous phrase goes, not the whole truth.
The Queen Of All The Cretins 180
Posted on
June 12, 2023 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Nicola Sturgeon has not been charged with any crime. Yesterday she was arrested, questioned and released without charge pending further investigation. We do not even know which specific suspected crime or crimes she was questioned in connection with, so it is manifestly impossible to meaningfully speculate on her innocence or guilt (save of course for the fact that all are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven otherwise, something Sturgeon herself often appears to forget).
Nevertheless, in Scotland the Contempt Of Court Act 1981 applies from the moment a person is arrested, as the country’s most senior lawyer and its official prosecution service were both keen to remind people yesterday in the clearest possible terms, and it applies equally whether you’re asserting someone’s guilt or their innocence.
So you need to be a really extra-special class of boneheaded numbwit to do this:
