Wings Over Scotland

Apologies for the slightly shonky quality of this video, readers, which is due to the fact that ITV are such monumental self-sabotaging clowns that it’s not actually possible to screencap any sort of digital broadcast of theirs – screw YOU, viral content! – so we had to do this by videoing our iPad with our iPhone.

Ouch. And speaking of monumental self-sabotaging clowns, Scottish Labour.

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It’s now more than three years since this site drew attention to the curious case of Progress Scotland, the zombie “polling company” run by the SNP’s Angus Robertson that had no employees and hadn’t published any polls since October 2020, but was apparently still accepting, and soliciting, donations from subscribers, and appeared to have disposed of a rather substantial amount of money (well into six figures) without producing anything to show for it.

We followed up the next day with another article about the company’s repeated delays in producing its 2021 accounts, which finally showed up in May 2023.

Here’s what the Progress Scotland website looks like today.

And once more, a few questions spring to mind.

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It’s been another fabulous day on the front pages for Nicola Sturgeon.

The stories were triggered by a speech in the House Of Commons from Tory MP Sir David Davis, which you can watch below.

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We’ve already discussed the contents of the videos released last week by the BBC containing interviews with Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Houston of Police Scotland and Crown Agent John Logue of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

But videos (especially lengthy ones) are always a bit of a pain to reference, and these are incredibly significant documents, so we thought it’d be quite useful to post the full transcripts too, with the text tidied up (taking out all the “um”s and “eh”s and so on) for ease of reading.

This is the interview with John Logue (Stuart Houston’s is here):

And below is what’s said in it. We’ve added a comment here and there, in red.

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We’ve already discussed the contents of the videos released last week by the BBC containing interviews with Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Houston of Police Scotland and Crown Agent John Logue of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

But videos (especially lengthy ones) are always a bit of a pain to reference, and these are incredibly significant documents, so we thought it’d be quite useful to post the full transcripts too, with the text tidied up (taking out all the “um”s and “eh”s and so on) for ease of reading.

This is the interview with Stuart Houston (John Logue’s is here):

And below is what’s said in it. We’ve added a comment here and there, in red.

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Alert readers will have found it hard not to notice that Wings is currently focused on trying to solve one mystery above all others: why nobody has been prosecuted for a massive theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds, which took place in open sight, beyond any dispute, and is openly admitted by someone who was there at the time.

Until this week, nobody in the two organisations responsible for criminal prosecutions in the country – Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (the Crown Office or COPFS for short) had issued any sort of explanation of why the original Operation Branchform investigation apparently fell by the wayside when it led police to discover a second crime: that of embezzlement against the SNP by its then-Chief Executive, Peter Murrell.

But this week, with very little fanfare, the BBC quietly put out two extended interviews with senior representatives of those organisations, seemingly the unused footage from their half-hour televised documentary “Peter Murrell: The Man With The Money”.

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In this scene, John Swinney is portrayed by Stewie Griffin (the baby), and the faithful membership of the SNP is portrayed by Brian Griffin (the dog).

We’re not sure any words are needed after that, but what the heck, we’re here now.

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John Swinney knows the rules. He can’t pretend he doesn’t.

So let there be no mistake about this: if Police Scotland and the Crown Office refuse to investigate the First Minister’s open public confirmation this week that a serious crime was committed by the SNP over the “ring-fenced” fundraiser money from 2017 and 2019, it will be beyond any fair dispute that Scotland is a corrupt banana republic where the powerful and the elite can simply do whatever they want, as brazenly as they like, and the law will turn a blind, uncaring eye.

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Huh.

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?

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You’ve had a few pretty gruelling pieces to get through in the last week or so, readers, so here’s something a little more light-hearted.

It’s from an episode of Broadcasting Scotland on 27 November 2020, a month after we confirmed our big story about the SNP accounts and the missing fundraiser money. In it, snug-toed SNP MP Pete Wishart opines that there really is nothing to worry about, and we should all just put our trust in the party.

We’ll leave you to judge whose opinion stood the test of time.

On Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told Laura Kuenssberg that the SNP’s accounts “went up and down” as her excuse for not noticing that hundreds of thousands of pounds had suddenly vanished from them overnight.

Several things leap out immediately from that clip.

One, there absolutely very much WAS “something glaringly suspicious in the accounts that I should have seen” – the party she led had raised almost £700,000 in two “ring-fenced” fundraisers that wasn’t there any more, which ought to have made its leader at least mildly curious.

And two, attempting to fob responsibility off onto the independent auditors simply won’t wash. It’s not their job to determine whether the SNP has kept its political promises or not, their job is simply to match up money coming in against money going out and produce a set of numbers to show what it all adds up to. It makes no odds to them if it was spent on a party conference, a fancy motorhome or a 50-foot golden statue of Danny La Rue. All they can see is numbers.

(In any event the party’s longstanding auditors resigned in 2023 rather than risk being caught up in any more dodginess. It took months for the SNP to find anyone else willing to take the job on.)

But even leaving those things aside, if we’re going to learn anything about how The Great Indyref Swindle got to this calamitous point unchecked we need to examine just how hard Nicola Sturgeon had to look the other way to fail to see what was going on literally under her nose and literally in her own back yard.

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Sadly, this turned out to be prescient this morning.

Laura Kuenssberg did give Nicola Sturgeon an uncomfortable time in their interview on her Sunday programme on BBC News, but when confronted with the one gaping open goal that Sturgeon has no answer for – and even when Sturgeon TWICE set it up on a plate for her – Kuenssberg failed to knock the ball into the empty net.

That doesn’t – by some distance – mean there was nothing of interest to note, though, so let’s take a walk through (the first instalment of) what was said.

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