Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will undoubtedly have noticed a number of, to put it mildly, explosive-sounding developments this evening regarding the ongoing inquiries into the Scottish Government’s misconduct over false allegations against Alex Salmond.

Several reports have quoted extracts from the former First Minister’s submission to James Hamilton, who’s investigating the current First Minister over possible breaches of the Ministerial Code relating to the investigation of the allegations.

The submission – delivered on Mr Salmond’s birthday – has been widely leaked to the media but only selectively reported, and like others Wings has obtained a full copy.

We are advised that its contents do not contain anything which breaches or potentially breaches Lady Dorrian’s court order protecting the identities of the complainers against Mr Salmond, and as such there are no barriers to us publishing the entire document in the public interest, because its contents make some extremely grave and disturbing allegations against the current First Minister.

We therefore do so below.

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Agreeing with Tom Gordon from the Herald is a position that we really don’t like to find ourselves in, readers. But we can’t find fault with a single word of this column.

We could quote almost any of it, and we recommend digesting the whole thing, but this is as good a passage to pick out as any:

For most of this site’s existence it was the Unionists who were denying the obvious realities staring them in the face. It’s a source of great discomfort to us that many on the Yes side are now picking up the habit too. But we are where we are.

Poor old Blair McDougall. He doesn’t think Scotland can do anything.

What a dismally rotten, hopeless wee province he thinks Scotland is. It must be such a miserable experience to be him, constantly ashamed of your own nationality. (Except, of course, Blair’s nationality is British, not Scottish.)

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We know that the 5th of January is unusually early to be giving out annual awards, but this is going to be pretty much impossible to beat, so God bless the P&J for giving us all a chuckle in these dark times.

Let’s just quickly check on that “expert”.

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There’s been a very longstanding grumble from independence supporters about the way the BBC displays its weather map, but today we saw a bit of footage from the UK general election a year ago this week that depicts the Corporation’s view of the country more truthfully than ever before. We thought we’d share it with you for fun.

Screw your eyes up a bit and you can still just about see where you are.

This week on Wings has been altogether more navel-gazey than we’re comfortable with, as various SNP MPs have mounted a series of all-out personal attacks on the site before the weekend’s crucial NEC elections.

So we’ll have a proper article for you a little later on today, but in the meantime it’d be remiss of us not to tidy up the last fragments of shrapnel, so we’ll direct you to the right of reply to Alyn Smith’s column that The National kindly gave us today:

(Sadly they chose to disable comments, we’d quite have enjoyed the reaction from the few remaining diehard leadership loyalists still posting there.)

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Wings Over Scotland marked its ninth birthday earlier this month. To be honest, we totally forgot about it until someone reminded us. Normally we mark the anniversary with a small reflection and taking of stock over how things are going, but this year we couldn’t be bothered – we’d already mentioned readership stats in August.

But today in The National we found out that we were apparently dead.

But reports of our demise have been, as the saying goes, somewhat exaggerated.

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As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.

One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.

(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)

So let’s see what we know.

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No explanation is given for why “writer at large” Neil Mackay has suddenly conducted a “wide-ranging, exclusive interview” with “one of Britain’s most senior spy chiefs” for today’s Herald On Sunday.

As far as we’re aware absolutely nothing has happened in respect of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent” to make the subject topical. Maybe Mackay just coincidentally bumped into Sir David Omand down the pub or something.

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Unlike the Hulk, this site very much prefers Andrew Tickell (previously Lallands Peat Worrier) when he’s angry, as opposed to his rather more customary appearance these days as a hearty and affable chronicler of life from the cosy perspective of someone embarking on a lifelong career in Scotland’s well-fed academic/media/legal elite.

He’s on fine fettle as the former in The National today:

The paragraph above is unfailingly true. But if Tories don’t even care about being seen to starve hungry children – just about the most monstrous, inhuman thing imaginable, as Tickell notes in cold, eloquent fury – it completely escapes our understanding why a substantial proportion of people still appear to believe they’ll give Scotland a second referendum out of some sense of morality and decency, just because they’ll have lost yet another election in a country that hasn’t voted Tory in the best part of 70 years.

We’re running out of time. We need a better plan.

Television’s transforming before our eyes, as both what we watch and how we watch it changes. An ever-greater number of programmes shown through increasing mediums. But that doesn’t equate to balanced political coverage being provided, quality product displayed, or distinct countries reflected.

The United States, despite the great wealth and talent available to it in Hollywood and elsewhere, is the worse for the absence of a properly funded and high quality public broadcasting service. Its society is the poorer and its democracy badly distorted by its absence. It’s why Scotland needs a properly funded public broadcaster.

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Readers, we can’t tell you how much we want to get back to just dissecting Scotland’s hopeless Unionist media for a living. It’s a lot more fun than what the current political circumstances are obliging us to do, so you can hardly imagine our excitement when we spotted what looked like an open goal in yesterday’s Mail On Sunday.

Our ears pricked up immediately at the sight of the words “up to”, which is invariably a sign of dodgy doings on the way, and so it proved. The article contained no solid data at all about the size of Scottish Government special advisers’ pay rises, only how many SpAds there were and which general pay bands they were in, each of which spans a wide range of between £14,000 and £23,000.

But while the Mail had spooned the sitter six feet over the crossbar – because the crude spin they’d put on it was total rubbish – there was still a loose ball just waiting to be knocked into the back of the net.

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