It’s probably past time that we put this all in one post for easy reference.
Herald journalists with no idea what a story is, start here.
Hindsight is 20/20, readers, but perhaps we ought to have paid a little more attention to the article below back in 2015.
Because as the old saying goes: when people tell you who they are, believe them.
At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.
Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.
This is an utterly extraordinary tweet.
The three people who were asking to see the SNP’s books weren’t Sean Clerkin, they were MEMBERS OF THE SNP’S FINANCE & AUDIT COMMITTEE. That is, they were people whose actual literal job is to monitor the SNP’s finances, and who are all drawn from the membership of the SNP.
So what Hunter is saying there is that the SNP chose three of its own members to serve on its own finance committee, yet they could not be allowed to carry out their duties because their loyalties did not lie with the party.
In which case, a reasonable observer might very well ask, what sort of stupendously, farcically incompetent organisation puts such people in such positions?
Fresh from being embarrassed over a ridiculous smear story this week about someone complaining to the police about the use of a well-known political phrase by a Wings commenter, Tom Gordon of the Herald went on quite the attack yesterday.
The thread, which contains a number of basic factual errors about events*, continued for several more tweets all generally rubbishing our scoop from Friday afternoon and suggesting that no proper journalist (“the rest of us”) would have run the story.
So he must be feeling quite left out this morning.
Alert readers will know that for the past 15 months Wings has been investigating the apparent disappearance of almost £600,000 raised from supporters of independence (not just SNP voters) by the SNP in two fundraising campaigns in 2017 and 2019.
The money was supposedly to be “ring-fenced” for spending ONLY in a future indyref, and the party gave explicit and hotly-stated guarantees at the time of the first appeal that the money would definitely NOT be spent on party business.
But when the party’s 2019 accounts were published they showed that the SNP had less than £100,000 in the bank at the end of that year, and total net assets of less than £272,000. The £600,000 from the fundraisers was nowhere to be found, and the then-party treasurer’s feeble insistence that it was “woven through” the accounts in some unspecified way satisfied only the most gullible.
This week Wings Over Scotland has been told that the matter is now officially under investigation by the police.
We’re currently busy pursuing a rather larger story, readers, but to keep you amused in the meantime we thought we’d share this absolute belter from Wings contributor Angus MacNeil MP today in The National:
Deftly put. Now back to work with us.
I’m already sick of all this rubbish about “gaming the system”.
When Labour set up the Scottish Parliament in 1999 they could have expected eternal rule if they’d based it on First Past The Post like the UK Parliament, but the Lib Dems insisted on PR as their price for co-operation and the appearance of consensus.
So between them they put together the AMS system (although virtually any PR system would probably have done much the same thing) which would ensure, they believed, that the SNP would never hold power alone, and would therefore never be able to use the parliament as a vehicle to deliver independence.
Dear Secretary,
I have supported independence for Scotland for as long as I can remember. I was never a party political animal, but immediately after the 1992 general election – that of the failed “Free by ’93” slogan – I joined the SNP since it was the only independence movement we had and I wanted to do something, anything, to help.
I was then living in the south of England and so joined London Branch. I served on the executive committee of that branch in various capacities for a number of years, was a conference delegate and spoke at both conference and national assembly. I also used holiday entitlement to travel to Scotland to help with several election campaigns.
When I returned home to Scotland I joined Tweeddale Branch and again served on the executive committee, for a time as vice-convener. I took part in a great deal of campaigning both for elections and for the independence referendum, and in fact made myself ill during the summer of 2014, so hard was I working for a Yes vote. I also stood as the SNP candidate in the Tweeddale West council by-election in 2013.
During the first 25 years of my membership I made many friends and had many wonderful experiences. I never imagined for a moment that I would leave the party before independence day.
Margaret Lynch is a former director of the anti-poverty charity War On Want, a former volunteer with Glasgow Women’s Aid and Strathclyde Rape Crisis Centre, founded the SNP Women’s Pledge and was elected to the Policy Development Committee of the SNP by the party’s members four months ago.
I’ve been a political activist for all of my adult life, firstly in the Labour Party for almost 20 years and then in the SNP for the last 23 years, and all my core beliefs and values have remained pretty constant throughout that time.
I’m a left-of-centre democratic socialist, internationalist and feminist.
A fair number of the folks that I was closest to in the Labour Party eventually ended up in the SNP – no real surprise, as we were labelled “Trot-Nats” by Brian Wilson when were in the Labour Party.
Unlike many Yessers I have the highest regard and respect for Brian – he is a values-driven politician and someone that I have always admired. The kind of country that Brian and I both want to live in would be remarkably similar. We just disagree about the route map of how to get there.
Yes Pete, we did check.
What happened was that there wasn’t a second indyref. And that’s how we know that leaving it to the SNP alone doesn’t work.
Please vote Alba, readers, or we’ll see you here again in another five years.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
