Wings Over Scotland

Last year I was booed on the stage of the SNP’s annual conference for attempting to have a debate on how we can achieve independence in the face of Boris Johnson’s unswerving refusal to agree to a referendum.

I know that it still sticks in the craw of many that an SNP representative was booed at an SNP conference for wanting to discuss how Scotland will become independent (the very idea!), but it only made me even more determined to ensure that the democratic voice of Scotland is heard.

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Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.

Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.

The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.

These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).

Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.

(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)

We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.

In today’s Sunday National:

Well, that’s good to know. Which members exactly?

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It’s important not to understate the magnitude of the chance we’re missing.

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The SNP’s message to you:

What they mean:

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TO: Colin Beattie MSP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 28 October 2020

Dear Colin,

I note that today you’ve sent an email to SNP members on the contentious topic of the party’s supposedly “ring-fenced” referendum campaign fund, which we’ve learned for the first time today has a grand official name – the Referendum Appeal Fund (which from here on we’ll call the RAF for short).

The email also contains some rather offensive implied smears about my website and myself, but I’m quite used to being abused on the internet so I’ll let that slide. As we’re both on the side of Scottish independence, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match I thought I’d try to reach a constructive consensus.

I notice that in your email you invite people who have “any questions” on the subject to contact you without hesitation, and while I’m not a member of the party I believe I do speak for a considerable number of people who are, so it would likely also save you a lot of tedious copy-and-pasting if you replied publicly to me as their representative.

(And because, y’know, if you don’t then you’ll probably get about a thousand individual emails from members containing the text below anyway, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time.)

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It was my birthday yesterday, readers. (Late presents still accepted. The cheapest one is fine.) I got taken out to lunch and there was someone’s new kitten to play with, but mostly what flooded in wasn’t birthday cards but new scandal about the SNP.

It’s hard to know where to even start tackling the avalanche of new information. There were extraordinary revelations from the Salmond inquiry. There were other shocking revelations about the investigation. There was Alex Salmond’s request for the separate independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon to determine whether she lied to Parliament (which it should have been doing in the first place).

We’ll get to all that stuff in due course. But because there’s nothing like a good delve through some data, we’ll kick off with the SNP accounts.

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The Electoral Commission has finally published the SNP’s 2019 accounts.

As Wings has been warning for most of this year, something in the region of £700,000 in supposedly “ring-fenced” money raised by two crowdfunding campaigns has indeed vanished into the maw of the party machine, leaving just under £97,000 in the bank.

(More than £300,000 down on last year, despite a £600,000 increase in “donations”, the bulk of which in fact came from the UK government).

This has happened despite the party angrily and categorically insisting that the money would NOT be spent until there was a new independence referendum.

What all that means is that if the UK government were to unexpectedly turn round tomorrow and grant a Section 30 order for a second indyref, Wings Over Scotland would have considerably more money in the bank to fight it than the SNP does.

The SNP also has a Holyrood election to fight in six months’ time, which normally costs it somewhere in the region of £1.5m – far more than its current total net assets of £272,000. As we told you back in January, the party is simply in no financial position to fight a new referendum campaign, which is very likely part of the reason it’s been in no rush to secure one for the last few years and has no remotely credible plan to do so.

It’s a matter of debate whether obtaining such sums of money under false pretences is a criminal offence or not. We invite anyone concerned about this state of affairs to ask the SNP what happened to their donation. We wish you good luck getting an answer.

The Scottish Parliament’s inquiry into the disastrously botched investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond, which has been paused for several weeks due to the Scottish Government’s repeated refusal to provide it with material it’s requested, resumes today and enters its final and critical phase.

In the next two months all the key players in the shambolic affair, including the current First Minister, her predecessor and both of their chiefs of staff, will give evidence. But today perhaps the most central figure of all will appear. Or rather, she won’t.

Judith Mackinnon, the civil servant whose prior involvement with the complainers in the case was central to the investigation collapsing on the grounds of illegality and bias, will speak to the committee remotely and in audio only, robbing them of the ability to see her face and body language – things highly critical to any interrogation.

The apparent reason for this, according to a recent report in the Times, is Mackinnon’s being “targeted on social media”. No further details of this “targeting” are given.

And there’s one rather big problem with that claim.

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At the weekend we made a half-joke about who’d be counting the votes in the SNP’s candidate elections to determine who’d be standing for Holyrood next year.

The joke just got a bit less funny.

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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.

The dead hand running the show at SNP HQ is no better illustrated than by the career path of Shirley-Anne Somerville.

For despite her failure to succeed in role after role, election after election, her star continues to ascend through the patronage of the SNP’s inner sanctum and to the bemusement of ordinary members and parliamentarians.

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