Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.
One man, of course, led from the front.
Ouch.
As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers as an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.
Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.
Objections to Salmond crowdfunding his judicial review – which concerns procedure, not the actual allegations – came thick and fast, with the emphasis on “thick”. Here, for example, is Labour’s Rhoda Grant:
Alert readers will have noted the weasel words “ultimately linked to”, which Grant uses to cynically imply the falsehood that the money will be used to defend the allegations.
She then goes on to claim that if this were true – which it isn’t – it would amount to Salmond bullying the alleged victims. But this isn’t a lawsuit. If the police decide the claims merit prosecution, the alleged victims won’t have to foot the bill for the case, so how much money Salmond does or doesn’t have at his disposal is irrelevant.
Grant’s assertion about what “decent people” will feel ought perhaps to be tempered by recalling that the last time she appeared in the newspapers was for hiring an intern from a religious charity that promotes the idea of “curing” homosexuality – despite being Scottish Labour’s equalities spokeswoman.
Tiny-brained Tory MSP Annie Wells echoed Grant’s complaint closely:
It’s perhaps worth analysing what’s being said in both of these comments. What Grant and Wells are demanding is that having been the subject of what he feels is a grave injustice, Alex Salmond should be left tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket if he seeks redress, no matter what the actual eventual outcome.
(The corollary obviously being that justice would only be available to the rich.)
If Salmond – or anyone else – asks for donations from members of the public and gets them, the bottom line is that that’s absolutely none of anyone else’s business. Nobody’s forcing Annie Wells or Rhoda Grant to dig into their pockets if they don’t want to – unlike the members of the public who, with both of them as with Murdo Fraser, are FORCED indefinitely to pay the fat salaries of people they’ve explicitly said they DON’T want representing them in Parliament.
(As far as we can tell Grant hasn’t even given voters the option for over 15 years – she just keeps being handed a free Holyrood pass by Labour and there’s not a damn thing the electorate can do about it – while Wells of course holds the distinction of being the MSP with the tiniest number of votes in the entire chamber, having been backed by just 2,062 of the otherwise-good people of Glasgow Provan.)
That’s not just throwing stones from glass houses, that’s installing whacking great seige cannons in them.
(And let’s not get into the broader topic of either party attempting to occupy the moral high ground at all, given their lengthy recent catalogue of convicted sex offenders, paedophiles and sex pests whose identities are still being protected by current female MSPs like Kezia Dugdale and Monica Lennon.)
Wells and Grant set an early high bar of stupid, but Labour MSP Jenny Marra cleared it easily with an intervention that was not only moronic but probably libellous:
Lacking even the basic wit to cover herself with weasel words like Rhoda Grant had done, Marra just gallumphed in like a drunk elephant with learning difficulties on four pogo sticks, asserting – entirely wrongly – that Salmond was crowdfunding his defence against the allegations, rather than the entirely separate judicial review into the way the matter has been handled.
Remarkably, despite scores of people having schooled the brainless list member (who was overwhelmingly but ineffectually rejected by the people of Dundee West by more than 30 percentage points in 2016) in this basic fact of law almost immediately, the tweet remains live as we write.
Apparently seeking to join Marra in the defamation dock was notoriously demented D-list actress Frances Barber, who quite impressively managed to interpret Salmond’s temporary resignation as an admission of guilt despite his statement repeatedly and strongly emphasising the exact opposite.
Next up came a real rarity – a Unionist politician who actually WAS elected, in the form of Labour MP Dani Rowley, who had a powerful moral point to make:
Rather curiously, though, we can’t find any evidence of her making any similar suggestions about funding women’s aid centres when her father Alex Rowley – MSP and former acting Labour leader – was himself suspended over allegations of stalking and harassment against a woman last year.
The case against Rowley Sr collapsed when Labour – having done nothing for weeks about the complaint – made it too difficult for the woman to continue with it.
Still, it’s nice to see his daughter finally discovering her voice on the subject.
It should probably go without saying that there were a few critical voices on the hand-wringing bleeding-heart wing of the Yes movement too:
And sensing Gerry Hassan’s deep concern for these “real causes”, we officially gave him our permission to donate the ten quid that the snivelling penny-pinching welcher still hasn’t paid up from our 2016 wager with him to the one of his choice.
These of course are just a tiny selection of the highlights. Since we started writing this post Salmond’s fundraiser has taken in over £4000 more, and to end on a positive note we thought we’d share one aspect of it that brought a smile to nearly everyone’s face in the wee hours of this morning:
It’s an ill wind, eh readers?
