Wings Over Scotland

Last night’s BBC Scotland documentary on the Alex Salmond trial was so shockingly biased that even the Herald, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Gerry Hassan couldn’t quite bring themselves to defend it. Anita Singh’s two-star review in the Telegraph said:

“The verdict in the Salmond case, by the way, was not guilty. He was cleared of all charges of sexually assaulting ten women while Scotland’s First Minister. However, it was pretty clear that the programme-makers hoped he would be found guilty; the first 45 minutes of the hour-long film were devoted to the prosecution case.”

While another female reviewer not known for being terribly fond of Mr Salmond, Alison Rowat for the Herald, observed:

“Taken with Ms Wark’s observations as the trial went on, it felt like proceedings were being played out all over again. Except this time Mr Salmond was not there to defend himself. 

Ultimately, you had to ask whether the film gave Mr Salmond a fair shake. For this reason, and many more, The Trial Of Alex Salmond had to appear far and above the fray on which it was reporting. From where this viewer sat, it did not pass that test.”

But not everyone kept their grip on reality.

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The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.

“What you’re saying is a man can try to kiss a woman, or he can say completely inappropriate things to her, when he’s 30 years older than her and he’s the First Minister of Scotland.

I’m worried about what this says more widely to other women, or just to us as a society. I mean, where does this leave us?”

Now, since the court found that neither of those things actually happened, the logical answer in that person’s case ought surely to be “facing prosecution for perjury”. But readers will be astonished to learn that that isn’t where the show went.

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If you didn’t already know that the BBC were going to run a character-assassination hatchet job on Alex Salmond tonight (and another one tomorrow), you could surmise it easily enough from the state of the Scottish media in the last few days.

We’ve almost lost count of the attack pieces on the former First Minister in the run-up to the show, from specially-commissioned opinion polls to conveniently-timed releases of allegations of unspecified “bullying” during his leadership and highly selective leaks from the documentary itself.

But it’s today’s Daily Record that dredges the depths of the journalistic sewer with a barrel and then scrapes the very bottom of it for the grubbiest, oiliest sludge it can find.

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There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about the SNP NEC, the rather secretive body that controls the operation of the party (and therefore also in effect the Scottish Government).

Extraordinarily, even if you’re a party member there’s no way to access a full list of the 42-member committee – something which for pretty obvious reasons of basic political transparency and accountability ought to be recorded prominently on the SNP website, let alone available to rank-and-file members.

(Ordinary party members aren’t even permitted to see the minutes of NEC meetings, which are restricted to NEC members.)

So we got our investigating hats on.

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Our regular weekend comedian Chris Cairns is off on a golf holiday this weekend (in fairness he’s only had four so far this year and it’s already August), but this is a sicker joke than anything he’s ever come up with.

We haven’t covered Martin Keating’s court case because we have some unanswered concerns about its transparency and communication, but it’s doing just fine without us, having passed £100,000 of its £155,000 funding target earlier today.

It’s bad enough that some random activist is having to do this and pay for it when the Scottish Government – who SHOULD have been doing it three years ago – sits with its thumb up its hole staring out of the window, but having their representatives actively attack and try to sabotage it is disgusting to a degree we can barely find words for.

We’ve had our fair share of doubts about stuff of late, but if Scottish independence achieved nothing more than putting a useless wage-stealing tosser like Pete Wishart out of a cushy Westminster job-for-life, it’d be worth doing for that alone.

Sometimes people are so stupid it’s legitimately scary. For example, all the Unionist politicians in Scotland who appear to genuinely think voters won’t notice that the recent exams catastrophe affected England (run by the Tories) and Wales (run by Labour) even worse than it did Scotland, and so they keep screaming for John Swinney’s head while having nothing to say about the even worse messes bursting all over their own parties’ respective jurisdictions.

(Esler misses the fact that the “deletions” were all actually retweets of a single tweet on the Scottish Conservatives which was deleted, but the point is the same.)

It genuinely boggles our mind that anyone, let alone a professional politician whose job it is to have their finger on the public pulse, could possibly imagine they’d ever get away with such utterly brainless naked hypocrisy, apparently believing that voters have memories less than 24 hours long and enjoy having their intelligence insulted.

(Incidentally, we can’t see any good answer to the exams problem. Either you have one year of massively artificially inflated grades, with all the tricky ramifications that presents further down the line, or you have a year of grotesque injustices to thousands of blameless individual students that are logistically impossible to remedy. The former is probably the lesser of the two evils, which poses the question of why the Scottish Government was too monumentally dim to see it coming and why it wasted a week defending the latter option before inevitably caving in and doing the sensible thing it was always going to have to do and should have just done in the first place.)

But it’s not just politicians.

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We’ve been having a closer look at the latest polling for next year’s Holyrood election (YouGov, from this week), and in particular the list numbers. We thought you might be interested in a little stat from them.

That’s the full breakdown. But that’s not the graphic that really tells the story.

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Chilling indeed, 1992 Sunday Times. Chilling indeed.

It is our grave and solemn duty to inform readers that there’s been another entrant in the New Act Of Union Of The Year competition. (This is an extremely niche joke.)

The details of this one, which is arguably even more bonkers than the last one, needn’t concern us here. But they’re a reminder of something we DO need to remember.

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We have written yet again, wearily and with little hope of a meaningful response, to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, a body with the power to destroy people’s lives but which appears to be answerable to no-one.

The letter is attached below.

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Ah, so NOW we know why the SNP’s woke junior league stitched up the NEC to stop serious, talented and experienced politicians like Joanna Cherry and Philippa Whitford standing as MSPs in next year’s Holyrood election.

Who could ever have guessed, etc?

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Labour sub-faction the Scottish Fabians this weekend published a call for “a new Act Of Union”, an idea that’s been kicking around in the party for some time since failed branch office manager Kezia Dugdale came up with it in 2016.

And at first it sounds almost intelligent and democratic, proposing a clearly defined path by which any of the four constituent nations of the UK could become independent.

But then you get to the small print.

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