Wings Over Scotland | Progressing To Oblivion

It’s now more than three years since this site drew attention to the curious case of Progress Scotland, the zombie “polling company” run by the SNP’s Angus Robertson that had no employees and hadn’t published any polls since October 2020, but was apparently still accepting, and soliciting, donations from subscribers, and appeared to have disposed of a rather substantial amount of money (well into six figures) without producing anything to show for it.

We followed up the next day with another article about the company’s repeated delays in producing its 2021 accounts, which finally showed up in May 2023.

Here’s what the Progress Scotland website looks like today.

And once more, a few questions spring to mind.

Its most recent accounts, published a few weeks ago, showed a dramatic drop in assets, from almost £60,000 to just over £8,000.

As the company is only required to publish “micro-accounts”, there was no explanation of where the money had gone, and the identity of the sole employee (and what they do all day) is a mystery. The micro-accounts contain a note saying “The director of the company has elected not to include a copy of the profit and loss account within the financial statements”.

Robertson’s last recorded entry in the MSP register of interests (from March 2026) said that he hadn’t done any work for the company since 2021 and expected to receive only a “final payment” of £501-£1000 for work before then.

The only other person believed to have worked for Progress Scotland, Robertson’s brother-in-law Peter Dempsie, stepped down in 2022.

So a company with no known paid staff, that’s been effectively dormant for almost six years and now doesn’t even have a website, has assets that look like this:

That is… a pretty strange trajectory, wouldn’t you say, readers? The firm’s assets have peaked four years after its last known work, and then just vanished overnight, and none of the numbers bear any relation to what it claimed about its subscriber base or any known costs of polling.

With the whereabouts of millions of pounds of money that was supposed to be used for the fight for independence – the SNP’s “ringfenced” fundraisers, the mysterious expenditure of Yes Scotland, and now Progress Scotland slipping quietly offstage – all now in some dispute, it looks more and more as though indy supporters have been taken for a very long ride to nowhere.

“Micro accounts” are also deployed by Believe In Scotland/Business For Scotland, who claim to have raised many hundreds of thousands of pounds in recent years but publish figures comprising only a tiny fraction of that. In 2024 BFS claimed a turnover of £300,000 but reserves of just £1,022 (alongside assets of £40,000) with no information about expenditure, salaries or the like. Where did it go? Wheesht for indy.

(Believe In Scotland has been listed as “dormant” for the past three years despite being the brand used on marches and rallies and in campaigning.)

The system offers a near-bottomless pit for people to hide their finances in, away from public scrutiny, for good reasons or bad.

The money comes in, and then… nobody knows.

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And while we wish we had a punchy or optimistic line to end this article on, that seems to be pretty much the end of the story. There’s very little anyone can do to probe the affairs of such companies and find out exactly what happened to the vast bucketloads of cash they extracted from hopeful Yes supporters’ pockets, except that we do know none of it has effected a single step of progress towards independence. The only thing moving forward in the last decade has been certain people’s bank balances.

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Not only do we not know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been, and we can’t even say what we’ve seen. This, folks, is not the road to Paradise.