Wings Over Scotland

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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The SNP has still not provided any sort of meaningful answer, either to this site or to anyone else, over the missing £600,000 from the party’s accounts that was supposedly “ring-fenced” for a future independence campaign and not under any circumstances to be spent on normal party politics.

Enquiries from members and even elected representatives have met with a wall of silence for months, so we were more than a little surprised to be forwarded a recent email exchange in which the SNP’s chief executive had engaged in discussion on the subject with someone who isn’t even in the party.

We thought you’d be interested in reading it.

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A reader alerted us to this. (You can skip the first minute.)

It’s a book currently being given to P1 children in Scotland, via the Scottish Book Trust. (We’re sure that by Christmas it’ll be getting read to them in class by drag queens.) And it’s something that people should probably be concerned about.

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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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We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.

So here’s this week’s.

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We have to admit the line below takes some chutzpah to even attempt. It’s a little bit like Harold Shipman refusing to admit to all the murders he committed on the grounds that revealing the victim/patients’ personal data would break the Hippocratic Oath.

We know, for an absolute and uncontested fact, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, that the First Minister has already committed the most serious breach of the Ministerial Code possible – lying to Parliament (section 1.3c). She lied about the date she first knew of the allegations against Salmond.

From the First Minister’s own personal written testimony, we know that the reason she lied to Parliament was that she had definitely also committed another breach of the Code, either by using Scottish Parliament premises for party matters (section 1.3i) or by failing to record government business discussed therein (sections 4.22, 4.23).

So it seems a bit late to be getting all bashful about the Code now.

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Lavish expenses recipient Pete Wishart MP doesn’t want to talk about Wings.

So that’s probably the end of that.

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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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