Wings Over Scotland

Today is going to be by some distance the quietest one in Scottish politics this week, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. Because while I just ignore unimaginably vast torrents of online abuse every hour of every day of every year, once in a blue moon some things get said that you just can’t let pass.

Paul Kavanagh made a lot of unpleasant personal-attack tweets yesterday off the back of an unpleasant personal-attack article on his blog, which I don’t propose to get into the many individual falsehoods and misrepresentations of here.

(While I believe his evidence in the Dugdale case actually did more harm than good, I don’t hold him responsible for that and I appreciated his willingness to try to help when others I’d considered friends had turned their back.)

But the comments above are too much to bear.

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Readers will be aware that Wings has been experiencing some enormous amounts of traffic this year, and it’s not only among the general public. Someone just forwarded us a reply they got today to an FOI request, and it reveals the site’s popularity – well, maybe that’s not exactly the right word – in Scotland’s corridors of power.

The last time someone asked that question (last October) the figure for Scottish Government computers accessing Wings over a six-month period was just under 1100, so the latest numbers represent an increase of almost 30%.

(It should be noted that the two periods overlap, so the true like-for-like increase is probably considerably more. Unfortunately the two requesters didn’t ask about the same sites so we don’t have direct comparisons, but we’re sure Craig Murray will be pleased with the #2 slot even though his site is currently closed because the Scottish Government, in the shape of the Lord Advocate, is trying to put him in jail for it.)

So a big special wave tonight to all our readers in the Scottish Government. We’re sure it’s nice to know of at least one place that’ll tell you the truth about what’s going on.

Alex Salmond’s spokesperson has issued the following statement this afternoon. We present it to readers unedited save for added emphasis of two sentences.

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Hey folks, remember the happy days when indyref 2 was going to be in “the first half” of the next Parliament? Well, here comes the totally surprising and unexpected news.

This was Ian Blackford on Sky News yesterday, quietly confirming that at best we can expect it in the SECOND half of the Parliament, ie 2024 at the earliest. (And that’s with all the usual waffly evasiveness about how it could be achieved.)

So if readers were wondering why Blackford had quickly released a squirrel to distract from the appearance, perhaps now they know.

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One month ago, writing a mild political slogan on a wall in Scotland in chalk – which washes off instantly at the first sign of a damp cloth or a small shower of rain – was enough to have uniformed officers of Police Scotland turn up at your door on suspicion of hate crime, conspiracy and breach of the peace.

Of course, that depends wholly on which views you’re expressing.

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This isn’t just a massive middle finger to justice and every voter in Scotland.

This is an act of sabotage.

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We were reminded this week of the amount of stick we got when we wrote these words almost five years ago, right after the 2016 Holyrood election:

(The rest of our post-match analysis wasn’t too shabby either.)

But readers, we have to grudgingly admit: we’re only NEARLY always right.

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Nicola Sturgeon’s progressive New SNP, for people who celebrate punitive rape.

Do give them both your votes, won’t you? #BeKind.

James Hamilton is either a crook, a coward or an idiot.

There is no other viable explanation for this:

There is NO DOUBT OR DISPUTE WHATSOEVER that the Scottish Parliament was misled when Nicola Sturgeon told it that the first she knew of allegations against Alex Salmond was on 2 April 2018. That is a material fact accepted by all sides, because everyone including the First Minister herself now accepts she was told on 29 March.

The question of whether Parliament was misled deliberately, or merely as the result of a vastly implausible slip of Nicola Sturgeon’s memory, is another matter entirely. But that it was misled – told something that was untrue – is not up for debate.

The Fabiani inquiry, which is stuffed with SNP stooges and has been starved of most key evidence, nevertheless still managed to observe that Parliament had been misled, although it made no judgement on whether it happened knowingly or inadvertently.

For James Hamilton, armed with far more evidence, to conclude not merely that the misleading had been accidental but that it didn’t happen at all, is a lie so barefaced as to be breathtaking, and so farcical as to defy any possibility of honest belief.

Especially as we’re not allowed to know how he arrived at that decision:

Much else in his report is bizarre. But that one paragraph alone destroys its credibility utterly and forever. And unfortunately that means that Scotland is lost. Independence is over. All is destroyed.

We had feared, as the very worst case, a fudge in which Hamilton would find, like the Holyrood committee, that Parliament had been misled but would bottle out of saying whether it had been deliberate or not. This conclusion is so utterly mad and ludicrous that it honestly never even entered our consideration as a possibility.

Readers can choose which of the three causes they find most believable, but at the end of the day it just doesn’t matter. Our country is a banana republic, a nation that North Koreans point at and laugh. To be honest, readers, if we were you we’d get out while we still could.

Every Yes supporter in Scotland dreamed of having our own Mandela to lead us to freedom. Unfortunately, we wanted Nelson but we got Winnie instead.

And now our country is no longer a safe place.

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Here at Wings it’s mostly our job to point out things that are broken. (Currently that’s mostly the SNP.) But there are also other more useful people working on actually fixing stuff. Readers might want to give them a hearing and perhaps offer some assistance and input of their own, especially as you can do it today without leaving your house.

It costs nothing and it starts at noon. All you need to participate is the virtual meeting software Hopin (also free). What is there to lose?

Word reaches us from this afternoon’s meeting of the SNP NEC that three members of the Finance & Audit Committee (ie about half of it, we believe) have resigned on the basis that they’re responsible for the party’s finances but are unable to carry out their duties as chief executive Peter Murrell refuses to give them access to the books.

We don’t yet know if it’s specifically in relation to the missing £600,000 in “ringfenced” fundraiser money that was supposed to have been earmarked for use in a second independence referendum campaign but which cannot be identified in the records of a party whose last published accounts showed only £97,000 in the bank.

(The SNP infamously claimed it was “woven through” the figures. Wings has received no reply to the letter we sent on behalf of some concerned members to party treasurer Douglas Chapman on the subject more than two months ago.)

We gather that the three are Frank Ross (a qualified chartered accountant and current Lord Provost of Edinburgh Council), Livingston company director Cynthia Guthrie and the Mid Scotland & Fife NEC member Allison Graham.

We’ll bring you more on this breaking story as we get it.

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