Wings Over Scotland

Everyone even remotely connected to Scottish politics has known for months that the below is the case. It’s an open secret.

But what’s playing out right now is something much bigger than the fate of one or two or three individuals. It’s the entire future of the credibility of Scotland’s justice system.

Like Robin McAlpine (who wrote the piece this week that’s from), Wings is acutely aware of the pitfalls of commenting on a live investigation, so let us be crystal clear from the beginning: nothing in this article makes any assertions or implications as to the possible guilt or innocence of any of the persons named in it.

Peter Murrell has already been charged and awaits his day in court. Nicola Sturgeon and Colin Beattie have been arrested but not charged and remain under investigation. What we’re about to say largely applies to both of the latter two, but Sturgeon is the more pertinent example of what we’re going to say, so we’ll use her as our illustration.

Because one of two things must be the case: either Nicola Sturgeon is guilty of some criminal wrongdoing or she isn’t. And in EITHER case, after so much time has passed, the only place the matter could be properly and finally determined is in a courtroom.

Commentators have noted that if she’s guilty, obviously she must be held accountable, but that if she’s innocent then she also deserves the right to have that fact established beyond reasonable doubt by a judge and jury, and not to be plagued by innuendo and suspicion for the rest of her life.

Police Scotland arrested Sturgeon and questioned her for nine hours. The house she shares/shared with Murrell was cordoned off, surrounded by a blue incident tent and searched for days in front of a media circus. Their personal possessions were taken away in clear plastic boxes as the world watched.

The SNP’s head office was also extensively searched, with large amounts of evidence removed by vanloads of burly officers.

And again, we must emphasise that that proves nothing. But it would seem patently absurd if after all that hoo-ha, after actually arresting someone who’d been the leader of the nation just weeks before, and after years of ongoing investigation and feverish speculation, the Crown Office And Procurator Fiscal Service turned round and went “Y’know, we don’t think this even needs to be resolved in public view. Let’s just forget it all happened and get on with our lives”.

Murrell and Sturgeon were husband and wife, they shared a home, and one of them was leader of the SNP while the other was the party’s CEO. Those facts tell us nothing about the guilt or innocence of either – both could be guilty, neither could be guilty, or either one could be guilty alone – but it has been reasonably posited that the public would be bewildered if one was to be put on trial while the other wasn’t, given that the alleged offence is embezzlement from the party they led and ran together.

The fact that one of them was also the First Minister (coupled with the well-rehearsed arguments about the dual role of Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate) would be likely, as been noted by those far more learned than this site, to risk an unhealthy degree of public cynicism – whether well-founded or not – about whether the law was being applied equally to the rich and powerful in the same way as the rest of us.

And without public confidence in the judicial system, you don’t have much of a country. So why not just get on with it?

Well, we know that even if we assume its integrity to be above question, competence is another matter altogether. COPFS is a dysfunctional shambles in general, which operates at glacial pace and has been haemorrhaging tens of millions of pounds of public money (over and above the costs of its normal function) for years while bringing the justice system into regular disrepute.

But however long COPFS’s litany of catastrophic failures gets, nothing changes, because – as Wings readers have been long aware – the body is accountable and answerable to no-one, and doubly so in this particular case.

Social media is alive with all manner of conspiracy theories from all sides regarding the inordinate amount of time Branchform is taking and the likelihood of the various parties ever seeing the inside of a courtroom, but if you talk to sober, sensible people in the worlds of politics, law or law enforcement there isn’t actually much difference in what they’re saying on the subject.

And all of them agree with Robin McAlpine’s assessment of events with regard to the numerous strategic leaks of information about the case.

The matter is beyond a joke. Uncertainty and opacity is poisoning Scottish public life, and the people’s confidence in their country. Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon and Colin Beattie must not be condemned to live the remainder of their days as Schrodinger’s Suspects, in a dual limbo where they’re neither convicted nor properly cleared.

It is not enough for justice to be done. It must be SEEN to be done.