Wings Over Scotland

In today’s Sunday National:

Well, that’s good to know. Which members exactly?

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It’s important not to understate the magnitude of the chance we’re missing.

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The SNP’s message to you:

What they mean:

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TO: Colin Beattie MSP, National Treasurer, SNP
DATE: 28 October 2020

Dear Colin,

I note that today you’ve sent an email to SNP members on the contentious topic of the party’s supposedly “ring-fenced” referendum campaign fund, which we’ve learned for the first time today has a grand official name – the Referendum Appeal Fund (which from here on we’ll call the RAF for short).

The email also contains some rather offensive implied smears about my website and myself, but I’m quite used to being abused on the internet so I’ll let that slide. As we’re both on the side of Scottish independence, rather than getting involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match I thought I’d try to reach a constructive consensus.

I notice that in your email you invite people who have “any questions” on the subject to contact you without hesitation, and while I’m not a member of the party I believe I do speak for a considerable number of people who are, so it would likely also save you a lot of tedious copy-and-pasting if you replied publicly to me as their representative.

(And because, y’know, if you don’t then you’ll probably get about a thousand individual emails from members containing the text below anyway, which doesn’t seem like a productive use of anyone’s time.)

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It was my birthday yesterday, readers. (Late presents still accepted. The cheapest one is fine.) I got taken out to lunch and there was someone’s new kitten to play with, but mostly what flooded in wasn’t birthday cards but new scandal about the SNP.

It’s hard to know where to even start tackling the avalanche of new information. There were extraordinary revelations from the Salmond inquiry. There were other shocking revelations about the investigation. There was Alex Salmond’s request for the separate independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon to determine whether she lied to Parliament (which it should have been doing in the first place).

We’ll get to all that stuff in due course. But because there’s nothing like a good delve through some data, we’ll kick off with the SNP accounts.

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The Electoral Commission has finally published the SNP’s 2019 accounts.

As Wings has been warning for most of this year, something in the region of £700,000 in supposedly “ring-fenced” money raised by two crowdfunding campaigns has indeed vanished into the maw of the party machine, leaving just under £97,000 in the bank.

(More than £300,000 down on last year, despite a £600,000 increase in “donations”, the bulk of which in fact came from the UK government).

This has happened despite the party angrily and categorically insisting that the money would NOT be spent until there was a new independence referendum.

What all that means is that if the UK government were to unexpectedly turn round tomorrow and grant a Section 30 order for a second indyref, Wings Over Scotland would have considerably more money in the bank to fight it than the SNP does.

The SNP also has a Holyrood election to fight in six months’ time, which normally costs it somewhere in the region of £1.5m – far more than its current total net assets of £272,000. As we told you back in January, the party is simply in no financial position to fight a new referendum campaign, which is very likely part of the reason it’s been in no rush to secure one for the last few years and has no remotely credible plan to do so.

It’s a matter of debate whether obtaining such sums of money under false pretences is a criminal offence or not. We invite anyone concerned about this state of affairs to ask the SNP what happened to their donation. We wish you good luck getting an answer.

The Scottish Parliament’s inquiry into the disastrously botched investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond, which has been paused for several weeks due to the Scottish Government’s repeated refusal to provide it with material it’s requested, resumes today and enters its final and critical phase.

In the next two months all the key players in the shambolic affair, including the current First Minister, her predecessor and both of their chiefs of staff, will give evidence. But today perhaps the most central figure of all will appear. Or rather, she won’t.

Judith Mackinnon, the civil servant whose prior involvement with the complainers in the case was central to the investigation collapsing on the grounds of illegality and bias, will speak to the committee remotely and in audio only, robbing them of the ability to see her face and body language – things highly critical to any interrogation.

The apparent reason for this, according to a recent report in the Times, is Mackinnon’s being “targeted on social media”. No further details of this “targeting” are given.

And there’s one rather big problem with that claim.

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At the weekend we made a half-joke about who’d be counting the votes in the SNP’s candidate elections to determine who’d be standing for Holyrood next year.

The joke just got a bit less funny.

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Unlike the Hulk, this site very much prefers Andrew Tickell (previously Lallands Peat Worrier) when he’s angry, as opposed to his rather more customary appearance these days as a hearty and affable chronicler of life from the cosy perspective of someone embarking on a lifelong career in Scotland’s well-fed academic/media/legal elite.

He’s on fine fettle as the former in The National today:

The paragraph above is unfailingly true. But if Tories don’t even care about being seen to starve hungry children – just about the most monstrous, inhuman thing imaginable, as Tickell notes in cold, eloquent fury – it completely escapes our understanding why a substantial proportion of people still appear to believe they’ll give Scotland a second referendum out of some sense of morality and decency, just because they’ll have lost yet another election in a country that hasn’t voted Tory in the best part of 70 years.

We’re running out of time. We need a better plan.

The dead hand running the show at SNP HQ is no better illustrated than by the career path of Shirley-Anne Somerville.

For despite her failure to succeed in role after role, election after election, her star continues to ascend through the patronage of the SNP’s inner sanctum and to the bemusement of ordinary members and parliamentarians.

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Voting is now open in the selection contests to determine who the SNP’s candidates at next year’s election will be. Given the extremely dodgy secret-Survey-Monkey-ballot shenanigans recently adopted by the party NEC, we’re uncomfortably reminded of a famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”.

An excellent blog by the former SNP Trade & Industry spokesman Iain Lawson today highlights the near-impossibility of effecting change from within the SNP now, due to changes made by the leadership to eliminate the influence of ordinary members.

Indeed, so secure do the party’s controlling faction consider themselves that they now feel able to openly call their own supporters “bitches”.

But not quite SO secure that they still don’t want to cheat.

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