Wings Over Scotland

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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So, having made a statement on Monday morning which asserted that she wouldn’t make any further statements, then making another statement on Monday afternoon, Nicola Sturgeon and her solicitor issued a third statement in 36 hours last night.

And while we acknowledge that this is a very high bar to clear, it contained one of the most troubling and blatant lies she’s ever told.

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Peter Murrell wasn’t even locked up in his cell at Saughton (we hope it’s the same one as Craig Murray’s) when the chump-suckering resumed.

And as the Nicola Sturgeon Loyal, led by her most faithful of lieutenants, set out to try to take control of the post-conviction narrative, let’s take a look at just what a boatload of bare-faced bullshit the above is.

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So there it is. We did tell you so.

There will be no trial, no cross-examination, no explanation. The people of Scotland, the members and supporters of the SNP, the wider Yes movement, none of us will ever know what really happened. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

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It’s nearly over, readers. Just one more week of this to endure.

The most miserable Holyrood election campaign of all time will end next Thursday with an election which will deliver Scotland’s most miserable devolved government of all time. Only the exact form, colour and shape of the misery remains to be determined.

So as the SNP promise through forked tongues to cut the cost of living with a pledge they know full well they have no chance of being able to actually implement, while using the powers they DO have to INCREASE the cost of everything that makes life WORTH living, let’s look at exactly what flavour of dog vomit we can expect to be choking down along with our state-approved organic broccoli and fat-free gruel for the next half-decade.

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We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.

To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.

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If events in Edinburgh today are anything to go by – when a march and rally announced with great fanfare seven months ago, backed by both the “independence” parties in the Scottish Parliament and featuring the First Minister as main speaker, attracted perhaps 1,500 people at the most to Calton Hill on a bright and sunny day – the independence movement faces an imminent final apocalypse.

So here’s how to prepare yourself for when the SNP win a landslide with 35%, Keir Starmer says “So what?” and then a deathly silence descends for another five years.

Even Kelly Given and Iona Fyfe didn’t show up for this one. That’s how bad it is.

As the six-year fight for justice for Alex Salmond continues, we thought you might like to see this clip from this morning’s Mike Graham Show, interviewing Paul McManus, the businessman and drummer in Glasgow rock band Gun who’s stepped up to fund the Salmond family’s case against the Scottish Government despite disagreeing with much of what Alex stood for politically.

We take our (hi-)hats off to him.

This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

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The first and most important thing to note about yesterday’s judgment in the Sandie Peggie tribunal is that it’s a very big victory. The tribunal found that Sandie Peggie was gravely and heinously harassed by her employer through no fault of her own, and she’ll be entitled to substantial compensation as a result.

It also ruled, repeatedly and unequivocally, that Dr “Beth” Upton (who’s referred to in the judgment as “the second respondent”) is a man.

After that, it lost its mind.

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