Wings Over Scotland

These are the people whose job it was to stop the leadership of the SNP from stealing almost £700,000 of “ringfenced” fundraiser money from independence supporters, and who utterly failed at that job.

It was also their job to stop Peter Murrell stealing the best part of £500,000 from the SNP, in a separate but related crime, and they failed at that one too.

A small handful of them (marked with red asterisks) tried their best to do their duties, and were blocked primarily by one powerful woman – Nicola Sturgeon – and a room full of cowards, weaklings and bullies, listed above.

This video is a horrifying watch.

But the most shocking part comes about 12 minutes in. Allison Graham, a member of the SNP’s Finance and Audit Committee (FAC) as well as of its National Executive Committee (NEC) relates how at an NEC meeting on 20 March 2021 she read out a statement from herself and two other FAC members.

Though the statement was quite diplomatically phrased considering the seriousness of the issues, the response to it from the online meeting was a sustained personal attack on Allison Graham from Cllr Ian Cockburn, then the co-leader of the SNP group on Highland Council and who’d completed a law degree just three years earlier.

Despite therefore presumably knowing that he and the other NEC members were legally liable for the SNP’s finances, Cockburn laid into Allison Graham with such a degree of unprovoked vitriol that she physically bowed her head in front of her PC screen, and then the rest of the committee – including Nicola Sturgeon – joined the pile-on, with both anger and mockery.

Most of those doing so were women, but alert readers will have also spotted the eternally poisonous Glasgow councillor Graham Campbell – part of Sturgeon’s inner circle and seen on the far right of the pic below – going so far as to say that a member of the party’s Finance & Audit Committee shouldn’t even have been allowed to read out a statement expressing the FAC’s concerns about the party finances at a meeting of its National Executive Committee.

(In other words, that the FAC literally should have been prevented from doing its job of warning the NEC about a massive seven-figure gap in the SNP’s accounts.)

This was entirely in character for Cllr. Campbell, who at around the same time was demanding that anyone having any dealings (even retweets on Twitter) with Wings Over Scotland – which was also trying to warn SNP members and indy supporters that their money had been stolen – should be expelled from the party.

Ian Cockburn and Christina Cannon, incidentally, are still on the SNP NEC today.

Allison Graham had read out the statement from the FAC members in the hope that it would be recorded as part of the minutes of the meeting.

But the NEC had stopped properly recording minutes of its meetings in November 2020 – by a remarkable coincidence, the exact same month that Douglas Chapman had been elected to replace Colin Beattie as National Treasurer specifically on a platform of delivering greater financial transparency, and recruited Allison Graham, Cynthia Guthrie and Frank Ross to help him in that aim – and started providing party members with only “Outcome Of Business” notes.

This is all ordinary party members were told about the 20 March meeting:

And even NEC members got only this:

It’s important to emphasise once again that at this stage the concerns being raised were solely about the missing fundraiser money, not Peter Murrell’s personal embezzlement from the party.

The SNP’s accounts for 2020 wouldn’t be published until several months after the FAC members resigned, and by the end of 2019 Murrell had only pilfered around £210,000 –  a small fraction of the amount of the discrepancy the FAC had noticed.

But all attempts to solve the problem had been frustrated not just by Murrell – who had obvious motivations to keep the finances away from prying eyes – but by the aggressive hostility of the NEC, the very body that was supposed to hold him accountable, driven by the attitude of the party leader.

And as Cynthia Guthrie ruefully notes, that was the real problem.

Nicola Sturgeon’s involvement in the coverup of the dodgy finances goes far beyond mere ignorance, far beyond even a wildly reckless lack of curiosity. She actively, brutally crushed any attempt to warn those responsible for the SNP’s finances of any alarming issues about them.

The FAC members told all of this to Operation Branchform police. And yet still nobody has been held accountable for this misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of pounds solicited from donors on a false premise, and which the SNP now admits had already been spent on something else long before the FAC members resigned and long before the majority of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement.

Alex Kerr, who was on that 2020 NEC, is now an MSP and SNP National Secretary.

Kirsten Oswald, the Business Convener who shut down every attempt by the FAC to raise the issue with the NEC, is now an MSP and a government minister.

(Hilariously, the SNP issued a statement yesterday that Oswald had been committed to transparently updating party members about what had happened at NEC meetings.

Let’s just remind ourselves what Oswald told members about a meeting where half the party’s Finance Committee had resigned because they had extremely grave concerns about the party’s finances and the Chief Executive’s refusal to provide them with even the most basic information required to do their job.)

Alison Thewliss, who was on the 2020 NEC, is now an MSP.

Ian Cockburn, who instigated the pile-on against Allison Graham – the only time he ever spoke at an NEC meeting, Allison told Wings earlier today –  has now resigned from Highland Council but is still on the SNP NEC.

Christina Cannon, who also joined in the pile-on, is still on the NEC and is an SNP councillor in Glasgow.

Graham Campbell, who thought it was outrageous that the Finance & Audit Committee was even allowed to report to the NEC on the party’s finances, is a councillor in the same ward as Christina Cannon, and chairs the SNP’s BAME Network.

Farah Farzana, who also joined in the pile-on and is also a former chair of the SNP BAME Network, describes herself as a “social injustice activist” [sic] and is currently Equalities And Human Rights Officer at Falkirk Council. She was the Scottish Parliament’s “ambassador” for World Hijab Day, and remains active in the SNP.

Heather Anderson, who also joined the pile-on, became an SNP MSP at last month’s election, giving her oath in “Dundonian Scots”. She previously founded Scottish Human Services, a charitable trust focused on “inclusion”.

Laura Brennan-Whitefield, who also joined the pile-on, is an SNP councillor. When seeking to be elected to the NEC in 2018, she expressed her wish to “influence Party policy in a progressive way”.

Stacy Bradley, who also joined the pile-on, stepped down as an SNP office-bearer in 2024 in order to concentrate on a new career as a trainee criminal defence solicitor, which might come in handy in the future.

Emma Hendrie, who also joined in the pile-on, campaigned actively in the SNP’s “Young Scots for Independence” wing – commonly known as the Twitler Youth for its slavish and vindictive devotion to Nicola Sturgeon – for the decriminalisation of sex work. (She’s the brunette on the right of the pic below.)

When she was seeking re-election to the NEC in 2020, she said “Constructive criticism is always welcome”, which we’re sure will come as comforting news to Allison Graham. Hendrie seems to have subsequently vanished from public view.

Findlay MacGregor, who also joined in the pile-on, is the brother of SNP MSP Fulton MacGregor, and was re-elected to the NEC in 2021 after all of the pro-accountability “rebels” elected in 2020 were pushed out. This 2019 campaigning pic is almost all we know about him.

All of the people above, and all the other members of the 2020 SNP NEC who didn’t resign, are complicit – either actively, as in the cases of those we’ve just listed, or passively in the cases of others – in the cover-up of the theft of the fundraiser money (and also in the cover-up of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement).

All failed in their duty to the party as NEC members, and in their legal fiduciary duties. All of them share the responsibility for the subsequent calamities that befell the SNP, because none of them asked the questions it was their job to ask, and instead attacked those who did.

But what the testimony of the FAC members this week really demonstrates is that everyone who didn’t resign from the NEC in 2021 was involved in a crime for which nobody has yet been held to account, and that it is now even more astonishing that the Crown Office decided not to even try to prosecute anyone for it, and refuses to offer any sort of explanation for why.

Crown Agent John Logue’s comments tell us nothing. WHY were the police and Crown Office not able to establish fraud, as the money had demonstrably been spent, and not on what it was raised for? And HOW were they able to establish there’d been no fraud, as at the point when the focus of the investigation switched from the fundraiser fraud to Murrell’s embezzlement they hadn’t questioned anyone in the SNP leadership? Like a magpie distracted by a shiny object, they simply dropped all the twigs they were carrying and went after their new prize.

(Conversely, the same organisation DID previously push ahead with a trial against Alex Salmond for which there was literally not a scrap of material evidence, and a string of witnesses whose testimonies were obvious and demonstrable lies.)

The SNP was the victim of a crime, but also the perpetrator of one, and until the latter is addressed we’re all just being told to Wheesht For Nicola. If we know what’s good for us, that is.