Wings Over Scotland

Sometimes you have to wait a while for people to catch up.

But patience is everything, readers.

All things, we hope, come to those who wait.

The SNP tried all sorts of excuses. First up, in February 2020, immediately after Wings had broken the story that “hundreds of thousands of pounds from two supposedly “ringfenced” fundraisers for independence have instead vanished into the hungry maw of the party’s seat-winning machine” was a simple, classic flat denial: “it’s categorically not true”. The very suggestion was “utter nonsense”.

But since it WAS true – and obviously true, all anyone had to do was take the briefest look at the accounts and notice the startling absence of £482,000 that should have been there – that one couldn’t last.

In October of the same year, after the SNP’s accounts were published and we returned to the story, the party treasurer tried something slightly subtler: the money was still there, but it was invisible, and anyone saying otherwise was a conspiracy theorist.

That one was just too silly to survive very long, so in early 2021 they came up with a wizard wheeze: to prove they had the money, they were going to spend it, despite the fact that there was no second referendum to campaign for.

More pertinently, as Wings immediately pointed out, the cunning scheme was rendered somewhat implausible by the fact that everyone could see they didn’t have the money to spend, and were in fact just planning to re-label their normal spending as being from the indy fund in order to pretend they’d used it for its intended purpose.

The plan duly collapsed catastrophically as the head of the “taskforce” resigned in the same week as the treasurer stood down in protest at not being allowed to see the books so that he could do his job.

(Biagi enigmatically described the role as the “worst job ever” before being abruptly silenced by being given a mysteriously non-specific sinecure as a “Chief Of Staff” in the House Of Commons, and was later rewarded with a lucrative but low-profile job – paying anywhere between £80,000 and £116,000 – as a Special Adviser to the First Minister, which he still holds.)

So in June 2021 they gave up on trying to be clever and went back to straight-up denial: there was simply NO missing money.

John Swinney was clear: specifically asked if the money had been diverted to other purposes, he replied “Not to my knowledge, no”.

But once again, the denials were inconvenienced by the unhelpful fact that the money visibly and stubbornly continued to be very much missing from the party accounts. So in June 2022, they tried admitting to having spent some of it – specifically around £52,000, or less than 8%.

But that wasn’t very credible either, so a couple of months later they briefly tried upping the figure to £253,000 (while intriguingly also increasing the total that had been raised and ring-fenced by £70,000), and insisted there was still £488,000 available.

But there wasn’t. The party’s actual bank balance was £343,000 lower than that, so nobody but the super-gullible was buying it.

Then in 2023, just days after Nicola Sturgeon’s dramatic and unexpected resignation as First Minister, they suddenly pivoted back to straight denial for a third time, hiding behind the need to avoid commenting on a live police investigation (a favourite trick of John Swinney’s, ironically).

And as far as we can recall (do please correct us in the comments if we’ve missed any further twists) that continued to be the official SNP position until today, when the poor suffering cat was finally released from the bag.

It has taken the SNP almost six and a half years to finally grudgingly admit what was indisputably obvious in 2020 to anyone with functioning eyes. And Swinney, who was either Deputy First Minister or actual First Minister for almost all of that time, can’t pretend that he didn’t understand the question.

He knows what “ring-fenced” money is and what can and can’t be done with it.

He knows fine well that more than just SNP supporters donated to the fund.

So he can neither morally nor legally use the money for general “SNP objectives”, which might be directly opposed to their interests (eg advancing the SNP cause in a general election against the parties those people might support).

Not to mention the rather more serious consequence, which is that his admission today unavoidably implicates him (and the rest of the SNP leadership since 2017) in direct, deliberate criminal fraud against thousands of ordinary Scots.

Because even if – and this is a VERY big stretch indeed – the SNP didn’t initially intend to spend the ring-fenced money on something else, they knew that they weren’t allowed to just help themselves to it later. Either way, this is severely criminal activity.

If you or we, readers, swiped an SSPCA collecting tin from a shop counter with 50 quid in it, we’d find ourselves hauled up in front of a beak in double-quick time, but apparently if you heist 700 grand (and then let your CEO spend it on £3,500 silver wine coasters and robot lawnmowers) you’re fine.

There has as yet been no sort of explanation forthcoming from either Police Scotland or the Crown Office for the mystery of why after five years of investigation nobody has been charged with the crime that actually triggered Operation Branchform (which then branched off into a separate embezzlement inquiry).

We have prima facie evidence that a crime has been committed (money has been obtained under demonstrably false pretences). We have the suspects to hand. We have the motive (the SNP was skint and needed the money). We have an admission from the suspects that the stolen items have been disposed of (spent). Even in a country as hopelessly, abjectly corrupt as Scotland, that ought to be sufficient to see someone in a dock.

At a very minimum, this fund should lead to “Honest John” Swinney’s early retirement. But he was not the prime mover in this sleazy business, and nor are mere resignations remotely enough to satisfy the demands of justice.