While watching reports from the Alba Party women’s conference that took place this afternoon, we saw something that we thought must be wrong.
But it wasn’t.
If you still can’t see it, you’re probably never going to wake up.
But have a little think about those highlighted words this morning anyway.
…you’re not paying attention. Real images from last night’s SNP broadcast:
It’s not a cult, though. The whole thing can be seen here.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
