Peter Murrell was sentenced on Tuesday for a crime of which the SNP was the victim. That has not diminished the appetite of the media in Scotland to continue its witch hunt. Ever since Murrell pleaded guilty the media in Scotland has descended into a feeding frenzy. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was the SNP who stole the £400,000 and that public money was involved. Creating this impression is of course entirely deliberate. Equally deliberate are the attempts to implicate Nicola Sturgeon in her ex-husband’s crimes. The media and her many enemies are furious that a five year long police investigation failed to find any evidence of criminality on her part and so are determined find her guilty in a trial by headline. This determination has nakedly political motives.
By damaging the SNP, the anti-independence parties and their media allies seek to delay or stall the rising support for independence in Scotland. They are aided in this by a section of the independence movement which wants to destroy the SNP for reasons of its own, in order to replace it by parties more to its liking. The problem for this group is that there is no other pro-independence party which comes remotely close to being able to win elections. There are only the SNP and the Scottish Greens, the latter of which they loathe even more than they loathe the SNP.
The level of media hysteria and hyperbole has been off the charts. We’ve been told courtesy of The Herald that this is the biggest political scandal in a generation and courtesy of The Times that this is a bigger scandal than the banking crash of 2008. I don’t know about journalists at The Times and The Herald, but I think former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson being convicted of 18 counts of sexual assault including being found guilty of raping a primary school age child is a political scandal orders of magnitude greater than anything Murrell has done, both in terms of its impact on the victims and in terms of its political import.
Donaldson is no back room party official like Murrell. He is a former MP and party leader, he’s the man who negotiated the deal with Theresa May which propped up her Conservative government after the Tories lost their majority in the 2017 general election. This deal gave us the hard Brexit which has so damaged the economy and international standing of the UK. The man behind it has been revealed as a predatory paedophile whose problematic behaviour was suspected by his colleagues – and presumably known about by the British intelligence services – for many years.
Quite incredibly, the Donaldson story has generated less attention from the British press than the Murrell scandal despite Donaldson’s crimes being far far worse, the political consequences of failing to unmask him being far worse, and despite credible allegations that Donaldson’s sordid behaviour was well known in DUP circles but the party continued to protect him. An AI query found that the volume stories about Murrell has been very high and sustained over a period of years whereas the volume of stories about Donaldson has been moderate and concentrated on his court appearances. It’s not difficult to conclude that this is because the SNP represents a threat to the British establishment whereas Donaldson is a firm and enthusiastic supporter of it.
Likewise the Tories’ VIP lane PPE scandal involved many millions of pounds of public money and naked corruption at the highest levels of the Westminster government but it has not sparked an orgy of media hysteria remotely comparable to what we’ve seen in recent weeks. It took BBC Scotland months even to acknowledge that there was an issue around Tory peer Michele Mone and her husband.
The Herald even saw fit to publish a piece asserting that Peter Murrell is enjoying this scandal, which the paper’s deputy political editor Rebecca McCurdy claimed was “chilling”. The claim was based on nothing more than McCurdy’s subjective assessment that Murrell was not sufficiently contrite looking in his court appearances. This is what passes for serious political journalism in a major Scottish newspaper in 2026. What’s really chilling is the willingness of the media in Scotland to collude in the repeated dismissal of the outcomes of Scottish Parliament elections by anti-independence parties and a Westminster government which did not like the verdict of the electorate. THAT, Rebecca, is chilling.
It’s important to point out, for most SNP and supporters of Scottish independence, our issue with the media in Scotland is not that the SNP is subject to scrutiny. Scrutiny of political parties is vital in a democracy, and it is of course important that the SNP be held up to scrutiny like any other political party. However that’s precisely the point, the scrutiny given to the SNP is not like that given to other political parties. Our issue is that media scrutiny of the SNP is obsessive, constant and unremitting, but the anti-independence parties are never subject to the same degree of scrutiny, even when they are involved in scandals which are objectively worse. Indeed the media is all too often content to act as cheerleaders for the anti-independence parties. When the Labour party faces political difficulties, BBC Scotland is content to allow Anas Sarwar to go to ground, but when it’s the SNP, SNP representatives are hounded and chased down.
The obsessive attention given to any perceived failings of the SNP and the Scottish Government is not balanced by due media attention to any successes of the Scottish Government. These are either ignored completely or mentioned in the briefest of reports. There has been little mention in the media in Scotland of the success of the Scottish Child Payment in reducing child poverty or that the instance of child poverty in Scotland is lower than elsewhere in the UK. What we did get on BBC Scotland was a report that the Scottish Government had missed its target for reducing child poverty. Even successes are spun as failures.
Nicola Sturgeon’s real political failure was to account for the anti-independence agenda of the media in Scotland. She believed that support for independence could be grown by a Scottish Government which demonstrated competent and capable governance. In a country with a fair and balanced media which accurately and fairly reported on a government’s successful policies as well as those which failed, her strategy could have worked. However when, as in Scotland, the media is overwhelmingly opposed to independence and heavily and disproportionately right wing even though 50% plus of the population is in favour of independence and habitually votes for centre left or left wing parties, this creates a democracy threatening media imbalance. The media in Scotland is primarily interested in fending off rising support for independence. It has abnegated its role of holding power to account when that power is Westminster power.
The true agenda of the media in Scotland has been revealed in all its ugliness in the feeding frenzy we have witnessed over the past few weeks. The very real undermining and hollowing out of the democratic process in Scotland, demonstrated by Westminster’s refusal to accept that for the fourth consecutive election, Scotland has voted for a pro-independence Parliament with a democratic mandate for another independence referendum has been almost completely ignored by a media which pretentiously and self-righteously claims to be holding power to account by publishing detailed photos of the curry sauce and coffee makers Peter Murrell bought with the money he stole from the SNP.
The democratic process itself is being rendered meaningless in Scotland while the media witters on about cruet sets. That’s the real biggest political scandal in a generation.
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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