Wings Over Scotland

In this scene, John Swinney is portrayed by Stewie Griffin, and the membership of the SNP is portrayed by Brian Griffin.

We’re not sure any words are needed after that, but what the heck.

Because it’s really, really difficult to overstate the blind idiot gullibility of the 40% of the SNP’s one-time members who still HAVEN’T quit the party since the revelations about the stolen fundraiser money.

(Let’s stop calling it “missing”, because there’s no mystery about where it is – the SNP have now openly told us that they stole it and spent it on the exact thing they swore blind they WOULDN’T spend it on.)

But it’s all fine, Swinney insists, because there’s been a “governance review” and new rules that will stop it from happening again. And indeed there was, in 2024, and indeed it did promise to make some vague unspecified changes.

But of course, the immediate problem with that is that we know the SNP doesn’t give a damn about following its own rules.

It was in the rules in 2021 that the party’s National Executive Committee, under the auspices of its National Treasurer and its Finance & Audit Committee, had to be allowed to see the books in order to prevent Peter Murrell embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds.

But when the Treasurer and the Committee tried to exercise their rights in order to do their legal duties they were refused by Murrell, and when members of the NEC tried to alert Nicola Sturgeon to this most serious breach of the rules she angrily insisted her husband wasn’t up to anything and that the treasurer and the committee members should simply shut up, leaving those with any conscience or integrity forced to resign.

The 2024 Governance Review actually made the leader’s power far MORE absolute over the party, chiefly by effectively removing any way they can be challenged, so absolutely nothing would prevent the same thing happening again. If an SNP CEO is on the fiddle and its leader is determined to cover up for them, the NEC – even assuming there’s anyone on it with a spine, which is unlikely – is toothless.

So THAT’S been going well since 2023.

But we don’t even need to make any such deductions or assumptions to know that the 2024 Governance & Transparency Review (its full irony-laden title) is cobblers.

On the GTR screenshot above we deliberately left in the next item, which categorically states that “membership numbers will be reported twice a year”. That rule, however, has been simply ignored under Swinney’s rule. The most recent published figures date from 1 June 2025, more than a year ago, and are only the second set to be released in Swinney’s 25-month reign.

(They weren’t actually released until last August, in the party’s annual accounts.)

The rule hasn’t been changed since 2024 – Swinney had already been leader for months when the report was issued and could have altered it if he wanted to – just ignored. Yet still the remaining diehards cling to the leadership’s every lie as gospel.

Everything’s fine, you see, because you’ll probably get a receipt for a raffle ticket. And the complicity of the previous leadership in Peter Murrell’s crimes, and the current leadership’s admission that it stole donors’ money, are apparently less important and pressing issues than controls on vape shops.

And they’re keen as mustard for it to happen again.

Now, it’s fair to say that anyone dumb enough to still be in the SNP probably deserves to be robbed at every step. “If we do everything the same, all the outcomes will be different” is the line that the leadership has taken on independence strategy, and – as Swinney points out in the video above – the loyal rump of the membership swallowed that, so why would they question anything else?

But everyone else who donated to the “ringfenced” fundraisers, only to see their money used to prop up a zombie party that is now the main obstacle to independence, would still like to see justice, and however much John Swinney (and Nicola Sturgeon) might wish otherwise, that story still has a long way left to run.

Because at the end of the day, there’s just too big a river of effluent on the floor for even the hungry gullets of the eternally stupid to choke down.