Wings Over Scotland

Having been privileged to serve as SNP National Treasurer, I’m aware of the duties that go with the post. Of course, it’s changed in some ways since then due to the scale of the party, the resources available and even technology. The days are long gone when Joan Knott, who has sadly since passed away, required to take a taxi down to my legal office to have cheques signed between court or clients.

But some things still remain fundamental, and in particular providing annual accounts for the party. That has been done for 2019, in the administrative sense, but what’s missing is their publication and provision either to the NEC or the party more widely.

For sure there’s been no conference but there are other bodies and other ways of making them available to party members. At NEC, conference and indeed anywhere else, members were entitled to see them and question me. It was their right to see them, and it remains so now. So why haven’t they seen them?

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A column on a Sturgeon-loyalist indy website that we read yesterday has been mildly annoying us ever since, and in the interests of open debate (but mainly because it’s cold and grey and rainy outside and we can’t go out and feed the swans) we thought it was worth taking half an hour to walk through it a little and explain just why it’s such a dangerous piece of fantasy nonsense.

But first here’s one of said swans. She’s about five months old and her adult feathers are just starting to come through. Isn’t she lovely?

In case things get a bit rough later we’ve got some squirrels and a really fat dachshund as emergency backup, so buckle in.

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Incredible, really. Just one day after we accuse the SNP of trying to dodge its problems by hiding from them and censoring anyone who brings them up, this happens:

Plenty of SNP members, including the party’s former Trade And Industry spokesman, know this approach is untenable. It really is time the SNP started listening to them. A party that scurries away bleating in terror every time it’s threatened with the slightest scrutiny is plainly not capable of winning the hard fight for independence.

Here’s one more for the list.

The comments from committee convener and SNP MP Linda Fabiani (we guess she must be another of those MI5 plants/secret Unionists) are really quite extraordinary. In terms of Parliamentary language they’re only a hair’s-breadth short of an invitation to step outside and settle things with an old-school dust-up in the car park.

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The weekend just past saw a convulsion as big as any we can ever recall witnessing on Yes social media, triggered by a series of tweets by Nicola Sturgeon which caused an extraordinary negative reaction out of all proportion to their ostensible content.

The reason was that the First Minister – who had remained silent about countless episodes of hideous misogynistic abuse aimed from her own side at MPs and MSPs like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry – had chosen to suddenly leap into action in defence of the toxically divisive horror that is Glasgow councillor Rhiannon Spear after Spear had been widely criticised for making blatantly false claims in a video promoting her attempt to be selected as the candidate for Argyll & Bute.

(Sturgeon had no such public condemnation for the torrents of abuse the SNP Twitler Youth then unleased on Kirsten Thornton, the female SNP activist and Generation Yes founder who’d pointed out Spear’s untruths.)

The move sent the party’s woke and sane factions into a frenzy of bloodletting which in itself will have little if any impact on the wider electorate, but nonetheless threw into sharp relief the life-and-death battle currently going on for the SNP’s soul.

And since that’s related to what we’ve been writing about on Wings for the bulk of this year, it seemed worthwhile to get some things down on the record once and for all.

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Some days it’s not even worth trying to get your jaw off the floor.

Yeah, THAT Neil Mackay.

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Just two days ago the Electoral Commission gave us a fourth supposed date for the publication of the SNP’s 2019 accounts: having first been due out in early August, they then told us to expect them in early September, and then last week, and then in “the next three weeks”, ie the middle of October.

But someone gave us a tipoff that we might be able to request them via Freedom Of Information, since ostensibly the only holdup was that the EC wanted to wait until ALL of the main parties’ accounts were ready and publish them all at once for tidiness.

So we sent one in, and we just got a very quick reply.

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We saw something disturbing in Parliament today.

During a debate on the UK government’s recent decision to abandon the notion of gender self-ID, SNP MP Anne McLaughlin told the Commons chamber that it was still the Scottish Government’s “strong commitment” to go ahead with highly controversial reform of the law BEFORE next year’s Holyrood election.

But that isn’t what Scottish voters were told earlier this year.

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The SNP have historically been swift to suspend any party members when there’s any hint of inappropriate conduct, never mind even a whiff of illegality. It’s been that way since 2015, with the axe falling on elected members as well as candidates in target seats and critical elections, and ordinary activists.

Not even a by-your-leave, let alone an explanation, is afforded – just suspension with immediate effect. And that’s all well and good, some might say. No hint of impropriety should attach to the party and making a virtue of acting swiftly can be both necessary and appropriate.

So why then no action against the Chief Executive?

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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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Senator Claire Chandler is a Liberal Party member of the Australian Parliament. Some recent experiences she’s had send a very serious warning about the likely outcomes of the Scottish Government’s wildly unpopular new Hate Crime Bill. She’s graciously allowed us to publish this column she wrote on the subject.

Early this month I received a letter from Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner directing me to attend a compulsory “conciliation” conference with somebody offended by my comments about the need to protect women’s sport and women’s toilets and changerooms. You can watch them here:

Ironically, the complaint against me was about an opinion article I wrote about free speech. You can read it here and make up your own mind whether bureaucrats at the Anti-Discrimination Commission should be able to censor any Australian citizens for this kind of public policy discussion.

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