Progressing To Oblivion
It’s now more than three years since this site drew attention to the curious case of Progress Scotland, the zombie “polling company” run by the SNP’s Angus Robertson that had no employees and hadn’t published any polls since October 2020, but was apparently still accepting, and soliciting, donations from subscribers, and appeared to have disposed of a rather substantial amount of money (well into six figures) without producing anything to show for it.
We followed up the next day with another article about the company’s repeated delays in producing its 2021 accounts, which finally showed up in May 2023.
Here’s what the Progress Scotland website looks like today.
And once more, a few questions spring to mind.
(Though just before we get to those, we can’t help noting in passing the aptness of Progress Scotland and the original “ringfenced” indyref fundraiser site both now being dodgy casino pages, casinos being places where lots of ordinary people turn up full of hope and dreams but get cynically fleeced, leaving only the proprietors rich.)
Progress Scotland’s most recent accounts, published a few weeks ago, showed a dramatic drop in assets, from almost £60,000 to just over £8,000.
As the company is only required to publish “micro-accounts”, there was no explanation of where the money had gone, and the identity of the sole employee (and what they do all day) is a mystery. The micro-accounts contain a note saying “The director of the company has elected not to include a copy of the profit and loss account within the financial statements”.
Robertson’s last recorded entry in the MSP register of interests (from March 2026) said that he hadn’t done any work for the company since 2021 and expected to receive only a “final payment” of £501-£1000 for work before then.
The only other person believed to have worked for Progress Scotland, Robertson’s brother-in-law Peter Dempsie, stepped down in 2022.
So a company with no known paid staff, that’s been effectively dormant for almost six years (other than two 2024 polls that shouldn’t have cost more than £10,000 max) and now doesn’t even have a website, has assets that look like this:
That is… a pretty strange trajectory, wouldn’t you say, readers? The firm’s assets have peaked a few weeks after its last known work (having grown exponentially over years when it apparently did nothing at all), and then just vanished overnight, and none of the numbers bear any relation to what it claimed about its subscriber base or any known costs of polling.
With the whereabouts of millions of pounds of money that was supposed to be used for the fight for independence – the SNP’s “ringfenced” fundraisers, the mysterious expenditure of Yes Scotland, and now Progress Scotland slipping quietly offstage – all now in some dispute, it looks more and more as though indy supporters have been taken for a very long ride to nowhere.
“Micro accounts” are also deployed by Believe In Scotland/Business For Scotland, who claim to have raised many hundreds of thousands of pounds in recent years but publish figures comprising only a tiny fraction of that. In 2024 BFS claimed a turnover of £300,000 but reserves of just £1,022 (alongside assets of £40,000) with no information about expenditure, salaries or the like. Where did it go? Wheesht for indy.
(Believe In Scotland has been listed as “dormant” for the past three years despite being the brand used on marches and rallies and in campaigning.)
The system offers a near-bottomless pit for people to hide their finances in, away from public scrutiny, for good reasons or bad.
The money comes in, and then… nobody knows.
And while we wish we had a punchy or optimistic line to end this article on, that seems to be pretty much the end of the story. There’s very little anyone can do to probe the affairs of such companies and find out exactly what happened to the vast bucketloads of cash they extracted from hopeful Yes supporters’ pockets, except that we do know none of it has effected a single step of progress towards independence. The only thing moving forward in the last decade has been certain people’s bank balances.
Not only do we not know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been, and we can’t even say what we’ve seen. This, folks, is not the road to Paradise.
Let’s be fair here….
Translating “Boku No Piku” into Indonesian isn’t cheap.
Angus Robertson is epitome of what a greedy self-righteous prick, who gets away with stealing from the school tuck shop looks like. He is also the architect of poisoning the minds of Scottish children with Sturgeons pet project: Operation Dyke-supremo. The wiping out of God’s children and all things natural.
Find the smallest jail cell and stuff fat boy into it.
There have been proposals to end abridged accounts for a couple of years but successive Govts have kept kicking the can down the road. It has been announced that they are to end in 2028 but I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t happen as the business lobby will complain about the additional red tape. The real reason they oppose it is because it allows for secrecy. Detailed accounts still have to be sent to HMRC so there is no extra cost in sending them to Companies House.
As if we needed a further example of Leftism in action. A mental disease that starts in the mind then spreads to the rest of the body.
There were a number of greedy cynical people in whose interest it was to get rid of Alex Salmond and anyone else with a whiff of integrity in the SNP
Angus Robertson has a very dodgy track record from the beginning .He was the one who quietly stitched up the members role in the party and whose wife had a significant role in the false accusations against Salmond.
If I were a suspicious person I would say he was doing his job quite well.
And we best not forget the Equinor hydrogen “deal” which benefits Norway and Germany more than Scotland…
link to robinmcalpine.org
Sadly, Robin’s another one who believes one of the most important things going on right now is G@za.
It’s a crying shame that Scotland’s “finest” can never resist throwing their own pet peeves aboard the Indy bandwagon.
Away and fuck off with your constant nitpicking shite John Hatey Main.
Nobody will be 100% aligned with the views of others. Maybe if you weren’t such a sad twat with fuck all better to do than constantly post your grumblings on here hour after hour, day after day, you could get out more and learn to interact with others in a more constructive and positive way.
The above the line article and following comments were about Angus Robertson, and yet you try to deflect off on an unrelated tangent to have a go at Robin, and deliberately circumventing the site’s moderation filter to do so.
Folk can have a look at the recent articles on Robins site index pages, and they will see you are off the money with your assertion.
link to robinmcalpine.org
Scotland under the SNP has become a very strange, corrupt place….and the politicians seem to be immune. I wonder when this will end?
“…a very strange, corrupt place….and the politicians seem to be immune.”
Not so strange at all when we consider the colonial playbook. Here we are reminded of Fanon’s analyses of the activities of a dominant national party in a contested colonial territory:
“the national party elite makes an accommodation with colonialism”; party elite includes “colonial agents pensioned off at high reward”; “behaves like a gang”; “feathers its nests”; “appoints its friends to high positions”; “takes the movement up a blind alley”; “lacks courage at the
decisive moment”; “becomes part of the (colonial) racket”; “attacks independence radicals using state (i.e. colonial) forces”; “delays independence”; “ruptures the movement”.
The Scottish electorate vote in MSP’s. The majority party then form a Government. The members of the party who form the Government vote in a First Minister who then appoints ministers to serve in his Government. Yet, somehow, this is all the fault of colonialism in the ‘one track mind’ of the learned professor.
The Scottish people are blameless in every thing that has gone and continues to go wrong. Everything would change by magic if Independence was achieved according to the nutters who pollute Wings. No plan required at all or maybe it is a secret only known to the select few. I will ask yet again Mr Baird, who do you see forming an honest competent Government. Some names would be helpful. Don’t be shy.
That is an exact match for the SNP hierarchy nowadays. It couldn’t be clearer.
So form a new national party, Alf, ruthlessly focused on transparency, accountability and honesty.
It’s not rocket science.
Even if Fanon’s diagnosis is spot on (and I’m not conceding that it is) you’d have been sacked long ago if you were a doctor forever repeating what ails the patient.
The patient wants to know what the cure is and see the cure being started.
“The patient wants to know what the cure is”
You know the only cure for colonialism is liberation, Hatey. The problem you and others face is you are still unaware or in denial of the (colonial) condition.
Typical modus operandi of the mediocrities that inhabit Holyrood. They’ve all got a side hustle on the go to maximize their profits from grifting cash out of the dupes.
Perhaps Robertson was simply anticipating some future household legal expenditure?
Asking for a friend…
‘There’s very little anyone can do to probe the affairs of such companies and find out exactly what happened to the vast bucketloads of cash they extracted from hopeful Yes supporters’ pockets’
Might it interest HMRC ?
I have never understood why the (UK) Companies Act requirements for annual accounts were watered down to permit these “micro-accounts”. It introduced a complete lack of transparency, not just for companies in the independence context but a great many other non-political ones, many with very substantial turnovers.
How the Hell did tHat Happen?
What a misnomer PROGRESS SCOTLAND is , it should probably be renamed as NAE PROGRESS SCOTLAND or bloated Angus’s personal piggy bank
Angus likes to look after the Dempsies , maybe he is worried that his wife’s memory is easily confused about her whereabouts at any given time , his BIL is listed as some apparent genius in marketing yet there is no significant upsurge of movement and publicity in moving Progress Scotland ANYWHERE
Surely this has many similarities to other snp attached groups , where donations are encouraged from independence supporters based on the promises that the said organisation will progress Scotland’s chances of independence
I must admit if I had donated my HARD EARNED money to any of these organisations I would be incandescent with anger that my donation seems to have disappeared without a trace, I would be so enraged that I would ask Polis Scotland to investigate what the money had been spent on , maybe it is keeping the ring fenced indy ref money company
Does Robertson’s wife still have a lucrative job within the SNP?