Wings Over Scotland

At the climax of a popular and multiple-Oscar-winning movie from 1995, the Scottish leader William Wallace is portrayed heroically roaring the word “FREEDOM!”

Unfortunately, at the time he’s bound by ropes to a wooden table, having been hanged until half-dead and then had his intestines torn out with a knife shortly before someone lops his head off with an axe, cuts his body into several parts and displays them on spikes all around Scotland as a warning to anyone who might seek its independence.

It’s in this sense that we’re forced to assume the Scottish Government has interpreted the word “freedom” in the phrase “freedom of information”.

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Holiday Boy is off for the next fortnight, readers, but there’s no way he’d have come up with anything funnier than this anyway.

We’re not sure he’s got the name right. But we’ll add that one to the list.

We’ve had another Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government.

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The most tedious question we ever get asked when we criticise the SNP – because we’ve explained it a hundred times already and none of the people asking have ever bothered to look – is “But what would YOU do to secure independence, clever-clogs?”

We’ve outlined that plan in detail repeatedly – you can read it again here if you want. But maybe we need something a bit simpler for the hard of thinking, so let’s have a go.

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We just noticed a finding from the most recent opinion poll that surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of every Scottish newspaper except the Press & Journal.

As far as we can ascertain, the P&J was alone in reporting the obviously newsworthy fact that just a quarter of Scots believe the First Minister’s ridiculous cock-and-bull story about “forgetting” the occasion when she first heard that her friend, colleague and mentor of 30 years was facing charges of trying to rape some of her other friends.

But the figures are part of a wider and depressing trend.

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We’ve just received the most extraordinary Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government, readers. Trust us, you want to go and make yourselves a strong cup of tea before you read it. Or get this guy to bring you one.

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When even someone as catastrophically vacant as Alex Cole-Hamilton thinks he’s got your number, it’s probably time to accept that the game’s up.

But that’s the unenviable position the First Minister finds herself in today.

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It doesn’t take a master analyst to see that the Salmond inquiry committee is running out of patience with the Scottish Government’s endless attempts to obstruct its work.

This afternoon it issued a statement, with obvious irritation, making clear that it did not wish to see documents the Scottish Government was trying to submit to it, which the committee had not asked for, and which had previously been struck down as unlawful by Lord Pentland in the initial judicial inquiry.

The Scottish Government’s only purpose in doing so was to try to put the details of the discredited and disproven-in-court allegations into the public domain with the intention of smearing Mr Salmond yet again, and the committee has made its displeasure with the plan clear, telling the Scottish Government to abandon its intended legal action to release the documents and get on with producing the ones the inquiry HAS asked for.

But there’s a little bit more to the story than that.

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We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.

It was quite the performance.

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In the light of yesterday’s revelations, we’ve sent the following Freedom Of Information request to the Central Enquiry Unit (CEU) of the Scottish Government.

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Back in the 1980s there was a hit game for the ZX Spectrum home computer called Worse Things Happen At Sea. In it you play a robot whose job is to get a heavily-laden cargo ship safely to port, except that more and more disasters keep befalling it.

It springs leaks, it veers off course, the engine overheats and the robot’s power runs down, until eventually the catalogue of catastrophes overwhelms the harassed metallic custodian and the boat slides down into the murky depths.

We wonder if that feels familiar to anyone at the moment.

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