Wings Over Scotland

Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, handed himself over to the Scottish police last Sunday morning. He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.

Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court for their journalism in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.

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We accidentally de-retired for a week last week because the outrage of Craig Murray’s imprisonment couldn’t be allowed to go unremarked. But we’re shutting back down again now, so here’s a fun challenge to occupy yourselves with in what’s left of what’s passed for the summer.

Because the feat described in that picture isn’t an easy one.

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For the avoidance of any doubt, this site does not believe that Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Leeona Dorrian, is corrupt.

It does not believe that she is acting at the behest of the Scottish Government or the First Minister, even though Lady Dorrian is known to wish to succeed Lord Carloway as the country’s most senior judge when he steps down in the near future and that position –  Lord President of the Court of Session – is in the First Minister’s gift.

What this site does believe is that she’s acting out of bias. Lady Dorrian is known to wish to dispense with juries in sexual-assault trials, and it’s our belief – based on observing her conduct during the trial of Craig Murray and her apparent emotional investment in the case – that that’s because she belongs to the sizeable group of people who fundamentally think that all acquittals in such cases are wrongful, and that in essence any man ever accused of rape or sexual assault is automatically guilty merely by dint of having been accused, on the grounds that no woman would ever lie about such a thing.

(Or more frighteningly, that a small minority of accusers DO lie but the false convictions or ruined lives of a few men are a price worth paying.)

Her actions, though – in jailing Craig Murray for eight months for a crime (so-called “jigsaw identification”) which is hopelessly ill-defined and for which nobody has ever been imprisoned before in all of world history – risk doing more to undermine the rights of women alleging sexual assault than any individual ever has before.

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Please note the below press release regarding the impending incarceration of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray

[29/07/2021; 15:52 pm; Edinburgh]

Legal precedent will be set tomorrow as Craig Murray will be the first person to be imprisoned on the charge of jigsaw identification in the UK, and indeed in the entire world. Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Dorrian, sentenced Murray to 8 months of incarceration following a contempt of court charge for ‘jigsaw identification’ relating to the trial against Alex Salmond.

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All recorded indyref polling on the standard question, from here and here.

The picture (click to enlarge) tells the story more eloquently than we could.

Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.

Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.

It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.

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Wings has been informed this morning by a reliable source that Police Scotland have now progressed their inquiry into the SNP’s “missing” £600,000 fundraiser money from an “assessment” to a formal criminal investigation into the matter, which was first revealed on this site in January 2020. We understand that an official statement to that effect will be forthcoming shortly.

[EDIT 12.27pm: the statement is below.]

”Police Scotland has now received seven complaints in relation to donations that were made to the Scottish National Party.

“After assessment and consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, we will now carry out an investigation.

“Enquiries are continuing and anyone who has any information which may assist with this investigation is asked to contact police.”

We look forward to the eventual outcome and continue our retirement in the meantime. Those still loyal to the party leadership wishing to be reassured that everything is fine and above board and the whole thing is a mad conspiracy theory and a total non-story are directed to Wee Ginger Dug and to the Twitter accounts of Pete Wishart, Mhairi Hunter, Tom Arthur, Stewart McDonald, Tom Gordon and David Leask, as usual.

Holiday Boy is still “resting”, so here’s a laugh from nearly six years ago.

Hear the bang? See the spark? No, us either.

Alert readers will have noticed that our quasi-regular crayonsmith Slacky The Holiday Boy is off again this week (and indeed next week), so as a special emergency service we bring you something almost as funny, albeit in a rather darker vein than usual.

The punchline, of course, is the last sentence of paragraph 9.