…appear to be absolutely raging tonight about this:
Folk used to accuse Wings of being divisive. But look who we’ve united!
It is our grave duty to inform readers that Kenny “Kezia Dugdale will be the next First Minister” Farquharson of The Times has done a tweet again.
It’s a curious thing to say before either of the inquiries has delivered its report. The only people who are asserting that Sturgeon has been somehow cleared of involvement in a conspiracy are the SNP, and even their own voters are split down the middle on it.
But let’s just check on how big the SNP are winning right now.
As a spinoff from the hysterical Scottish media witch-hunt over last week’s piece on Neil Mackay, today we found ourselves listening to a podcast from last May by Courier editor Davie Clegg and former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale.
While it was obviously of personal interest, we had a specific reason for listening – we suspected it might contain some helpful information that our lawyers had been looking for (which as it happened it did).
But there was also something else really interesting that we weren’t expecting.
If there’s one subject this site can speak about with authority, readers, it’s defamation. We’re now into the FIFTH YEAR of a court action we brought against former Scottish Labour branch office manager Kezia Dugdale after she’d smeared us in a newspaper and in the Scottish Parliament with a vile personal slur which a sheriff and three senior appeal court judges all found to be unequivocally false and defamatory.
But they also ruled that because Dugdale is a drooling halfwitted imbecile who doesn’t know what simple words mean she was entitled to use her stupidity and ignorance as a defence, so we lost the case and to this day (the original smear having happened way back in 2017) our lawyers are still negotiating with her lawyers over the final costs.
So trust us when we tell you this: today’s front-page lead in the Herald On Sunday is a great big pile of stinky unmitigated horse-bollocks.
Because we know whereof we speak.
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.
With precisely the grim level of cynicism we’ve now come to expect as standard, the Scottish Government has released a key document relating to the Salmond inquiry two days before Christmas, hoping it’ll be buried in the ongoing coronavirus-and-Brexit-related implosion of the UK.
The document, which contains legal advice relating to the judicial review brought by Salmond regarding the Scottish Government’s investigations into false allegations of misconduct against him, is extremely heavily redacted. But a few interesting passages remain, so let’s have some fun.
As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.
One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.
(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)
So let’s see what we know.
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.
The SNP’s earth-shattering 2011 majority election victory, which paved the way for the 2014 independence referendum, dropped a bomb on Scottish politics.
What few people realised at the time was that it was also going to set up a series of massive paydays for one of Scotland’s wealthiest demographics: lawyers.
Some days it’s not even worth trying to get your jaw off the floor.
Yeah, THAT Neil Mackay.
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.
Two opinion polls, just over one Parliamentary term apart:
MAY 2014
JULY 2020
That is not a politically healthy country, readers.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
