It’s our sad duty to report this fact to you, readers: our experience of sending Freedom Of Information requests to the Scottish Government is basically that the more answers you get from them, the less information you end up having.
See below for a case in point.
Committee on the Scottish Govt Handling of Harassment Complaints
Dear Ms Fabiani and Committee Members,
We have now had the opportunity to consult on Friday evening and over the weekend with our client on your clerk’s latest emails of Friday afternoon. Those followed the convener’s letter informing us that you do not intend to publish our client’s submission on the Ministerial Code, a submission which was sent to you on December 31st and which was carefully considered by this firm, and by Counsel, prior to submission.
Your latest communications and the decision not to publish exemplify the confusion and legal difficulties created by the Committee and which now plainly undermine the capacity of the Committee to fulfil the remit set by Parliament.
We almost missed something today because it was hidden behind a bad headline.
One way or another, the current hell of Scottish politics will soon be at an end.
As we write this, we still wait for Scotland’s hopelessly compromised Lord Advocate to decide whether he, as John Swinney has already done twice, will refuse to obey the will of the Scottish Parliament by releasing data demanded by the Fabiani inquiry.
We suspect he’ll surprise everyone and the information WILL be released, because according to analysis by Craig Murray it’s actually completely useless, and the Scottish Government has undeniably been red-hot when it comes to deluging the committee with vast screeds of junk documentation it hasn’t asked for and doesn’t want.
By coincidence, that same Craig Murray will go on trial in Edinburgh tomorrow for his liberty, for the crime of allegedly telling readers of his blog the truth about the shameful failed conspiracy to imprison Alex Salmond for crimes he didn’t commit – a conspiracy, remarkably, for which nobody has yet been held to account in any way despite the most obvious of grounds for suspicion of perjury, and which the Scottish Government is still frenziedly trying to conceal.
Speaking of liars, we thought it was probably time to update the list below.
This is definitely fine and not at all suspicious.
Geoff Aberdein is the man whose evidence could destroy the First Minister. We know he’s already told the High Court under oath that he had a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon on 29 March 2018 to discuss the Salmond affair.
Sturgeon claims otherwise, saying he just popped in for a friendly hello while seeing someone else, and that the meeting – which the Scottish Government had repeatedly denied ever happened at all, until it suddenly changed its mind and admitted it last August – was so inconsequential that she forgot about it entirely for almost a year, which is why she’d told Parliament in January 2019 that it didn’t exist.
Which of those accounts is correct will determine whether the First Minister was lying to Parliament deliberately and whether she has to resign under the Ministerial Code.
But now, not only will Aberdein – the single most important figure in the entire inquiry – NOT be called as a witness, but the public will not be allowed to see even a redacted version of his written testimony so that they can judge who’s telling the truth.
What conceivable reason could there be for that? How could either “The meeting was arranged in advance and we talked about the allegations” or “I was in visiting someone else and just popped my head round the door briefly to say hi” ever need to be a state secret the Scottish public mustn’t know? And yet it is.
No cover-up here, folks. All open and transparent and above board. There’s definitely nothing going on that the Scottish Government desperately wants to hide from you. It’s all fine. Ssssshhhh, now. Sssshhhh for Nicola like good little boys and girls. Write another of your nice wee blogs about how Boris Johnson will just give in for no reason and independence is inevitable. But no questions. Definitely no questions.
We’re sure you all read this story last night.
Via another source we’d known it was coming for a few hours and were all set to follow it up, but in fact Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph did a pretty thorough job on it in a comprehensive piece, even listing all the times the “prepared” civil servants had had to go back and “clarify” “errors” in their evidence even after dozens of hours of practice and £55,000 worth of “training” in how to not quite tell the truth under pressure.
It was hard not to wonder how abysmal their performances would have been if they’d only had – say – £30,000 worth of coaching at your expense.
So we have our answer. According to press reports today (although we haven’t seen an actual official reply), John Swinney has refused to formally tell James Hamilton that his inquiry into possible breaches of the Ministerial Code by the First Minister over the Alex Salmond investigation ought to include the matter of whether she repeatedly lied to Parliament about what she knew and when.
Wave goodbye to justice, readers.
Because the First Minister and her deputy are now proven liars and cowards.
This is a significant development. (Click to enlarge.)
Weirdly, we’re not actually sure how many members are on the Holyrood inquiry committee at the moment. There are normally nine – four SNP and five opposition – but with Andy Wightman having recently resigned from the Greens we don’t know if he’s still on the committee or not, since he was originally there as a Green nominee. If not, we don’t know whether, when or by who he’ll be replaced.
But the other four non-SNP members have tonight issued a formal request that James Hamilton, who’s conducting the other inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon’s actions relating to the Alex Salmond affair, be instructed officially to investigate the matter of whether she lied to Parliament.
This, of course, is a subject Wings has been covering for some time.
Alert readers will undoubtedly have noticed a number of, to put it mildly, explosive-sounding developments this evening regarding the ongoing inquiries into the Scottish Government’s misconduct over false allegations against Alex Salmond.
Several reports have quoted extracts from the former First Minister’s submission to James Hamilton, who’s investigating the current First Minister over possible breaches of the Ministerial Code relating to the investigation of the allegations.
The submission – delivered on Mr Salmond’s birthday – has been widely leaked to the media but only selectively reported, and like others Wings has obtained a full copy.
We are advised that its contents do not contain anything which breaches or potentially breaches Lady Dorrian’s court order protecting the identities of the complainers against Mr Salmond, and as such there are no barriers to us publishing the entire document in the public interest, because its contents make some extremely grave and disturbing allegations against the current First Minister.
We therefore do so below.
As it happened, it was fortuitous that this story intervened and stopped us writing the story we meant to run yesterday, because now we’ve got a two-for-the-price-of-one on the increasingly farcical insanity running riot in the offices of the Scottish Government.
Alert readers will have noticed the above piece from today’s Times, revealing that the Scottish Government just can’t seem to stop breaking the rules (and squandering huge vats of taxpayers’ money in the process) when it comes to Alex Salmond.
We’ve now filed a formal complaint with the Scottish Information Commissioner about this, because what we’d forgotten last week was that our original request was actually sent in September and it’s now been almost 60 working days with no sign of a proper response, not the 20 it’s supposed to take.
Because for some reason the Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t want you to know what the First Minister and Geoff Aberdein talked about in March 2018, and we think that you probably should.
We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.
So here’s this week’s.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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