Wings Over Scotland

Having once been a Scottish Labour MEP, I joined the SNP 10 years ago because I believed we needed the party to secure independence. I was warmly received by local and national members including Alex Salmond.

I became an active member in Edinburgh West and represented them at conference, became a member of the National Council and almost became the MP for Kilmarnock, losing narrowly to Alan Brown (now the MP) in the selection.

(I was incidentally almost blocked from running because I wasn’t “sufficiently loyal”. I was allowed to stand on appeal because Kenny MacAskill on the appeal panel said, “Well Hugh if you don’t agree with a vote in Parliament couldn’t you just go to the opera instead?” I agreed and was approved accordingly.)

My relations with the SNP have not admittedly always been plain sailing. I resigned once, when Nicola Sturgeon held up the front page of the Sun during the 2016 election after it tactically decided to back the SNP in Scotland (whilst supporting the Tories in England) because Murdoch always liked to back winners.

This raised serious questions about Nicola’s judgement and made me suspect she isn’t as smart as she thinks.

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This tweet sums it up pretty well.

“I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s still worth celebrating.”

God help us all.

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We’re only two-thirds of the way through Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence to the Fabiani inquiry, and there’s probably not much point in expressing our opinion on it because you could almost certainly have guessed what it was going to be. The First Minister has been disingenuous, evasive, defensive and at times outright dishonest.

But although we were expecting all of that, this truly shocked us:

That’s the First Minister flatly stating, under oath, that even now she doesn’t know who all the complainers are. And readers can make their own minds up about how credible a claim that is. But I can tell you this:

I know who they all are.

Craig Murray knows who they all are.

Every journalist who covered the trial knows who they all are.

(And we can reasonably assume their editors also know who they all are.)

In fact pretty much everyone who’s in any way connected to Scottish politics knows the identity of every single one of these women. If you’re willing to believe that we all do but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t, well, fair enough. But also, I’m a Nigerian prince and I’d like to pass several million pounds through your bank account. Please get in touch.

Yesterday’s evidence session at the Fabiani inquiry had several standout moments, but by a narrow margin this was our favourite.

And just in case you were wondering, yes, that IS Scotland’s top prosecutor, the Lord Advocate, chief of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, James Wolffe QC, repeatedly refusing to tell an MSP whether or not it’s a criminal offence in Scotland to refuse to comply with a court-ordered search warrant.

So next time you’ve ramraided a load of iPads and the polis come knocking on your door asking if they can have a nosy around your attic for them, just tell them they can’t come in because it’s a matter of your motivations.

Let us know how that works out for you.

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We just put up a post, readers, but we’ve pulled it again because this has happened:

Because of this:

More as we get it, but this would seem to be an extraordinary move from the Tories if they weren’t pretty confident they had the backing of the other opposition parties. At a minimum it’s quite the scene-setter for tomorrow’s appearance of the First Minister in front of the Fabiani committee. We presume we don’t need to tell you to stay tuned.

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We’ll say one thing for Police Scotland – when it comes to Freedom Of Information requests, dealing with them compared to the Scottish Government or Crown Office is a breath of fresh air. Responses tend to be reasonably swift and you actually get some straight answers, like these.

And in this case they’re pretty remarkable answers.

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I became an SNP member aged 15 on the back of the 2014 independence referendum – gutted that we had not taken the step but hoping that it was just a matter of time.

Every Yesser I knew was either in the SNP or had just joined it, so I did too. Like many others, I didn’t want to disappear into the shadows and be put back into our box. We weren’t going anywhere.

Thus Nicola Sturgeon became SNP leader and FM, and rightly so – nobody was more qualified or deserving of the post. I went to her tour of Scotland and began to think how lucky we were that there was one of us, a woman of the people, leading the country.

Someone who spoke honestly, candidly, and you could relate to. Someone who upon speaking everyone’s hearts would open and our smiles would never leave our faces. She reaffirmed my commitment to the SNP and there was no doubt that she was going to take Scotland to new heights.

Alex Salmond had resigned, and even though he was also my hero and without him I would not have joined the SNP nor became interested in politics, the FM was the most important figure. She was FM, he was not. Where Alex Salmond had not succeeded, she would.

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We’re just watching today’s session of the Fabiani inquiry, featuring the Lord Advocate, the Crown Agent and the Principal Crown Counsel. There’s been an extremely long preamble from both Fabiani and James Wolffe mainly concerned with the anonymity order passed by Lady Dorrian during (not before) Alex Salmond’s trial, which is the foundation stone of everything crooked that’s happened around the Salmond case.

The order – and for clarity we make no suggestion whatsoever that this was its intent – is the basis for every piece of evidence that’s been suppressed in the inquiry, and for the prosecutions of Mark Hirst, Craig Murray and others, and also for the threats of prosecution issued to this site, The Spectator and to Alex Salmond himself, preventing him giving his evidence in full to the inquiry.

And we couldn’t help wondering how different things would have been, how much less damage would have been done to the integrity and credibility of the entire Scottish political and legal establishment, if it hadn’t been for this guy.

Byline Times court reporter James Doleman – extraordinarily, as he’s a specialist court journalist and as such knows the rules better than most – tweeted the name of one of the accusers very early in the trial to almost 40,000 followers, almost causing it to collapse. It was his doing so that directly led Lady Dorrian to pass the anonymity order – in Scotland, such orders do NOT apply automatically as they do in England.

(Doleman was not prosecuted for actually naming one of the women, although Craig Murray still awaits a verdict, five weeks after his trial, which could see him imprisoned for up to two years for merely allegedly hinting at their identities.)

Without the order, it would have been perfectly lawful for people to discuss the names of the complainers – whose allegations the jury found to be false – after the trial. It would have been possible for people to know, and form an opinion based on, who they were and who they were connected to and what the “plan” they were “mulling” was.

But because it isn’t, Scotland has been turned into a laughing stock – a byword for ham-fisted corruption and malice – the independence movement has been torn in two, and the Scottish Government itself may yet collapse.

So, y’know, thanks for all of that, James. Great job.

So this is a thing now:

And basically, what?

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After this morning’s mini stats post, quite a few people have asked in the comments if there’s any means of comparison between Wings and mainstream media outlets. And the shortest answer is no. The Scottish press is terribly coy about its online readership, offering almost nothing by way of verified figures.

(For a meaningful comparison it would also be necessary to separate out their politics coverage from general news, sport and everything else, which they’ve never done.)

But what used to be possible was at least comparing their print sales, via the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures that newspapers published monthly (for national media) or six-monthly (for supposedly “regional” papers like the Herald and Scotsman), which we kept a record of in our Reference section.

When we went to look at the page today we noticed we hadn’t updated it in just over a year, and figured it could do with a dusting and sprucing. But we were in for a surprise.

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Wings Over Scotland pageviews, March 2020-Feb 2021.

No wonder only dogs can hear Pete Wishart’s screeching now.

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It’s the second sunny day in Bath since last September, readers, so we’re going to go out and feed the wildlife, but we thought you’d enjoy a quick roundup of some of the distractions the Sturgeonite elements of the Scottish media are punting today in a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the devastating contents of Alex Salmond’s epic evidence session at the Fabiani inquiry on Friday.

We’ll make this quick.

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