Anyone with two functioning braincells knows that the only reason the anti-independence parties and the SNP’s enemies are so keen on an inquiry into the Murrell scandal is because they seek to make political capital out of it, damage a party that keeps defeating them at the ballot box, and with it hinder progress to independence. They are determined to keep the Murrell scandal going, talking incessantly about it in hyperbolic and apocalyptic terms because they are furious that criminal charges were not brought against Nicola Sturgeon and they failed to get the election victory they so craved in May.
This is why what they are demanding is not an inquiry but a kangaroo court. They’ve already decided that the SNP is guilty and merely want a hyper-partisan forum in which to air all their beefs with the SNP and generate yet more anti-SNP headlines in a media which has lost all sense of proportion, even claiming that this is the biggest political scandal in a generation.
No, The Herald, this is not the biggest political scandal in a generation. That would be the Tories’ PPE VIP lane scandal which cost the public purse hundreds of millions. Or it would be the Tories’ partygate scandal, the Post Office Horizon scandal which saw dozens of innocent people imprisoned, or it’s the Windrush scandal which saw hundreds of people who were legally resident in the UK and with every right to live here deported to Caribbean countries which they often had not seen since childhood. Or it’s the lies and deceit which characterised the winning Leave and Better Together campaigns in the EU and Scottish independence referendums. Or it’s the scandal of the then Prince Andrew being given a lucrative official position at the behest of his mother, a post which he then used to enrich himself and allegedly sell sensitive information to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein who acted as his pimp.
Or it’s the scandal of the Iraq war when Tony Blair faked a dossier falsely claiming the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction poised to attack British military bases in Cyprus and used it as a pretext to take the UK into an illegal war which caused the deaths of 179 British service people and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Take your sordid pick, there are many more to choose from.
The Murrell scandal isn’t even the biggest political scandal this year. Those would be Mandelson and the Chinese influence scandals, both of which involve matters of national security as well as allegations of financial impropriety. The Murrell scandal is merely the most hyped.
All of these are scandals which are orders of magnitude greater than Peter Murrell and his eclectic shopping list both in terms of their financial cost to the public purse and more seriously in terms of the human cost they caused. However they are Westminster scandals and therefore don’t count.
The hype around the Murrell scandal is all about derailing Scottish independence as support for it is consistently in the majority in all polls except YouGov’s, which arrives at its No-friendly results by dint of some highly questionable methodology. The British parties still equate support for the SNP with support for Scottish independence and believe – incorrectly – that if they can reduce support for the SNP they can neuter support for independence. Despite their denials, they know the issue of independence is not going away while the appeal of remaining with Westminster is ever diminishing. Staying in a UK that espouses the racism and intolerance of the far right is not an attractive prospect to a large majority of Scots.
Hence the howls demanding an investigation into the internal finances and governance of the SNP, the British parties and press think it’s their last big chance to mortally wound the SNP and derail Scottish independence. These demands have nothing at all to do with a concern for probity and transparency in political life and everything to do with point scoring against a political opponent.
Let’s be very clear, despite all the innuendo, there is no evidence that any public money was embezzled by Peter Murrell. If there was any evidence, it would have been all over the press by now. The Westminster Scottish Affairs Committee know this too. The SNP’s Westminster group files its own accounts separately with the Electoral Commission. These accounts are signed off by the party’s Westminster leader, not Murrell. No monies were ever transferred to the central party during the 2015 to 2023 period, so Murrell never had access to any public money for his embezzlement. The Electoral Commission already publishes everything that the Scottish Affairs Committee, Sarwar and Baillie are asking about. It’s all available at http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk SNP Westminster Group. The answer is already out there in the open. It just isn’t the answer some people are hoping for.
Pro-Labour journalists like Paul Hutcheon, Labour’s Jackie Baillie, and Sam Taylor of Labour associated anti-independence organisation These Islands have been poring over all of this like a teenager examining his plooks ever since Murrell’s guilty plea, looking for something to squeeze. One of them would have found something by now if there was anything to find. They’ve found nothing, so all we get are evidence free insinuations that public money might have been involved.
All this is why the amendment of the Scottish Greens to the Labour motion calling for a Holyrood inquiry into the SNP is so important. It shifts the narrative from evidence free partisan point scoring conducted by politicians against their foes to a neutral inquiry into how we do politics in this country, one which looks at all parties, the SNP as well as its opponents. It’s a simple principle. Parties which profit from dark money from unknown sources, or money given to them by the super-rich and corporations, allegedly and implausibly without expectation of anything in return, do not get to lecture other parties about financial probity and transparency.
Labour in Scotland accepted a six figure donation from the Easdale brothers, owners of the McGill bus company and decided to oppose re-regulation of the buses. It accepted another six figure donation from private healthcare companies and decided to involve the private sector in NHS Scotland. It’s legitimate to ask whether there is a link. Labour would rather we look at the SNP’s finances.For their part the Tories are up to their neck in dark money, while Reform has received millions from questionable cryptocurrency billionaires but we are supposed to believe its policy of encouraging cryptocurrency is entirely coincidental.
Labour’s motion called for an inquiry conducted by MSPs, an exercise in political grandstanding and point scoring which would focus solely on the SNP and allow the other parties to pretend they occupy the moral high ground even as they continue to whore themselves to their dark money and corporate and super-rich donors. The SNP agreed to support an amendment put forward by Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens which materially altered Labour’s self-serving motion. As Greer put it in an interview with the BBC’s Martin Geissler: “Getting Westminster to investigate the SNP would be like getting Rangers to investigate Celtic.”
The proposal adopted by Holyrood reads as follows:
“That the Parliament believes there is a need to restore public trust in politics following multiple recent financial scandals, including those uncovered by Operation Branchform; further believes that an independent review into party political finances would go some way towards restoring this trust; believes that, to avoid this becoming a nakedly partisan process, it should be independently led rather than conducted by parliamentary committee, and that its remit must apply to the funding of all political parties; recognises wider concerns about the role of money in politics, including the scale of donations by extremely wealthy individuals, and the influence of organisations that refuse to disclose their funding sources, and calls for the devolution of power over the regulation of political parties and their funding to allow for the implementation of any recommendations of the independent review that would require legislative change.”
Labour, the Tories, and above all Reform UK, all have serious questions about their own finances. They cannot be allowed to get away with the pretence that it’s only the SNP, a party which unlike them is funded entirely by its members and supporters, which has questions to answer about its finances. All of these parties suck on the teat of corporate donations, dark money from think tanks whose finances and backers hide in the shadows, and cash from the super-rich. Yet we are supposed to believe that all this cash is showered upon them out of sheer altruism with nothing expected in return. Meanwhile Farage continues to hide from questions about his £5 million donation or present or bung.
My personal highlight of the debate was when Willie Rennie threw a wee tantrum after the SNP pointed out the Lib Dems took a £2.5 million donation of fraudulent money and refused to pay it back. They really don’t like being held to the same degree of scrutiny they demand of the SNP.
“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear,” sneered Sarwar during the debate. Well quite, Anas. Now let’s see what Labour has to hide.
If the Commons Scottish Affairs Committee rejects this Holyrood decision it will be proof that they are in fact motivated by a desire to weaponise the power of the state against an opposition party, setting a dangerously antidemocratic precedent which will surely be gleefully taken up by the far right barbarians at the gate should they succeed in gaining power at the next Westminster general election. It will mean we can dismiss their claim that they only seek to bring clarity, transparency and accountability as hypocritical and opportunistic cant. It also gives the SNP a cast iron reason for refusing to cooperate with what is clearly a kangaroo court which has grossly exceeded its authority and which has zero evidence that any public money was involved. The Murrell affair is literally none of their business.
This motion very cleverly uses the Murrell scandal to raise bigger questions about the state of the financing of all political parties and allows the SNP, the Scottish Greens and the wider independence movement to seize the initiative. In their haste to score points against the SNP, Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories and Reform have only succeeded in ensuring that their own financial dirty laundry is going to be hung out to dry. Anas Sarwar and Labour’s Holyrood contingent just learned about the law of unintended consequences. Their eagerness to score some SNPbad points has bitten them on the arse.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this this week but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while.There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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