Wings Over Scotland

The Electoral Commission appears to have missed yet another deadline for publishing the SNP’s 2019 accounts (we’re waiting on them to return our phone call), so we’ve got a moment to talk about something else relating to the party’s finances.

[EDIT 12.56pm: the Commission now “hopes” to have the accounts published “in the next three weeks” along with those of the other main Westminster parties.]

The Scottish press covered itself in as much disgrace over the publication of the will of lottery winner Colin Weir after his tragic death last year as it had done during his life. Pretty much every paper in the country ran lurid headlines about how he’d “blown” or “burned” (translation: spent) half of his £80m share of the 2011 jackpot in nine years.

Weirdly, the Scottish Sun and the Daily Mail stood out for (mainly) respectful coverage focused on the fact that Colin Weir had in fact used most of the money on good causes and generous support for friends, family and strangers.

(Also, both of the Weirs were fairly old and already in quite poor health when they won the money, so why wouldn’t they spend it? You famously can’t take it with you.)

But the Mail was almost unique in the fact that its headline mentioned something that seemed to stand out as the most obviously newsworthy aspect of the will.

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Last night on social media a few people raised a semi-interested eyebrow at Scotland On Sunday’s front page, and wondered if the suspiciously unattributed lead story might be something balanced and worthwhile, or if it’d be by Dani Garavelli again.

We have sad news to relate.

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Over the last year or so, this site’s commentary on matters surrounding the attempted imprisonment of Alex Salmond over false allegations of sexual abuse has attracted a considerable amount of ire from a section of the readership, demanding “proof” of the involvement of the current First Minister.

Such proof has been impossible to provide for legal reasons. But it’s always been the case that the truth could only be suppressed for so long, and events in recent days have brought the first chinks of light through the wall of smoke and mirrors the Scottish Government has been attempting to surround the matter with.

So in our very lightest and softest shoes, let’s tiptoe through what is both a labyrinth and a minefield and see if we can make some of it a little easier to understand.

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During the 2014 indyref, the astonishingly vast imbalance of the mainstream Scottish media was partly compensated by a huge rise in new media, with dozens and dozens of sites filling the gaping chasms where printed and broadcast media would have been in any country with a press worthy of the name at such an exciting time.

The subsequent shrivelling of that presence has been one of the least observed and explored phenomena of the six years since the referendum, and especially since the SNP’s election victory in 2016. The incredibly wide-ranging, mutually-supportive pro-Yes new media is now down to a tiny handful of outlets, most of which are barely read (and most of which would celebrate if the others burned down in a chemical fire).

There are many and varied reasons for this worrying situation, but before we get into those let’s have a quick look at who’s still who and what’s still what.

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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.

We have no information as to why, although we do know it committed contempt of court by providing so-called “jigsaw identification” of one of the complainers in the case. If that’s the reason for the show being pulled, it’s going to be VERY interesting in terms of our ongoing enquiries with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service about why a number of Scottish newspapers and websites critical of Salmond haven’t been acted against for publishing exactly the same information, while pro-Salmond blogger Craig Murray faces a trial and a potential two years in prison for doing less.

We’ll keep you posted with anything we find out.

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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.

Join us in our astonishment below.

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So that you don’t have to, we endured tonight’s Dani Garavelli programme on Radio 4 as well as last night’s Kirsty Wark one, and to be honest there’s very little to report.

It’s a statement of the blindingly obvious – the SNP is currently split between young Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for whom independence is only one aspect of creating a pure and woke new Scotland, and older Alex Salmond-supporting traditionalists for whom independence itself is the only true goal and whatever happens afterwards is in the hands of democracy and fate – interspersed with Garavelli and her media pals taking the chance to air some of their own unconnected grievances like pouting toddlers.

So we get Garavelli bleating at length about how lots of nasty people on the internet have called her out for her indisputable, provable contempt-of-court identification of one of the accusers of Alex Salmond, and yet another demented rant from poor old David “reds under the bed” Leask about the evils of this site, and so on and so forth.

You can listen to it by clicking the pic above, but frankly we wouldn’t bother.

Last night’s BBC Scotland documentary on the Alex Salmond trial was so shockingly biased that even the Herald, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Gerry Hassan couldn’t quite bring themselves to defend it. Anita Singh’s two-star review in the Telegraph said:

“The verdict in the Salmond case, by the way, was not guilty. He was cleared of all charges of sexually assaulting ten women while Scotland’s First Minister. However, it was pretty clear that the programme-makers hoped he would be found guilty; the first 45 minutes of the hour-long film were devoted to the prosecution case.”

While another female reviewer not known for being terribly fond of Mr Salmond, Alison Rowat for the Herald, observed:

“Taken with Ms Wark’s observations as the trial went on, it felt like proceedings were being played out all over again. Except this time Mr Salmond was not there to defend himself. 

Ultimately, you had to ask whether the film gave Mr Salmond a fair shake. For this reason, and many more, The Trial Of Alex Salmond had to appear far and above the fray on which it was reporting. From where this viewer sat, it did not pass that test.”

But not everyone kept their grip on reality.

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The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.

“What you’re saying is a man can try to kiss a woman, or he can say completely inappropriate things to her, when he’s 30 years older than her and he’s the First Minister of Scotland.

I’m worried about what this says more widely to other women, or just to us as a society. I mean, where does this leave us?”

Now, since the court found that neither of those things actually happened, the logical answer in that person’s case ought surely to be “facing prosecution for perjury”. But readers will be astonished to learn that that isn’t where the show went.

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If you didn’t already know that the BBC were going to run a character-assassination hatchet job on Alex Salmond tonight (and another one tomorrow), you could surmise it easily enough from the state of the Scottish media in the last few days.

We’ve almost lost count of the attack pieces on the former First Minister in the run-up to the show, from specially-commissioned opinion polls to conveniently-timed releases of allegations of unspecified “bullying” during his leadership and highly selective leaks from the documentary itself.

But it’s today’s Daily Record that dredges the depths of the journalistic sewer with a barrel and then scrapes the very bottom of it for the grubbiest, oiliest sludge it can find.

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