Wings Over Scotland | The Land Of Do-As-You-Please

The contempt for the Scottish public now being openly shown by public servants paid from the public purse to answer to the public has at this point reached such endemic levels that we’re not sure an acceptable level of trust can ever be salvaged.

The reply above is not just evasive, not even just pathetic, it’s insulting – not just to us, but to every citizen of Scotland.

The letter we sent on 15 July has simply been ignored.

There is no attempt whatsoever to engage with the Dean of Faculty’s analysis, which clearly finds unarguable evidence of a crime. It merely repeats Police Scotland’s fobbing off of the decision to the Crown Office, who to date have also refused to offer the public any explanation why nobody has been prosecuted for a serious criminal offence committed by the governing party of the country.

It does fit a pattern, though.

Time and again in recent years, the SNP government has demonstrated its utter contempt for the law of the land, spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money fighting hopeless court cases, losing them, and then refusing to implement the courts’ rulings. It has to be dragged kicking and screaming into eventual compliance, often having deliberately caused delays of several years.

It does so secure in the knowledge that the establishment – and in particular the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, whose head, the Lord Advocate, is also a government minister answerable to the First Minister – will protect it at every turn.

(Click image above for the full, deeply troubling article.)

The kindest thing we can say about the latest non-response from DCC Houston is that it continues to focus attention on the festering cancer at the heart of the Scottish judicial system – the Crown Office, where justice goes to die. But if Police Scotland want to avoid being tarred with the same brush, they’re going to have to start doing a lot better than this.

Wings will take advice from its legal team on where we can go from here, but there are numerous possible options. We continue to await a response from Police Scotland to a Freedom Of Information request on the matter from last month, which has now passed the deadline.

It joins another FOI request, this one from early June, which is now more than a month overdue and which we’ve filed an official complaint over.

Police Scotland are usually very quick with FOI responses, in stark contrast to almost any other public body in Scotland, so one can only speculate as to what could be taking so long with these ones, neither of which is very complex or difficult.

But as regards the reply we started this article with, we’re struggling to imagine what “new evidence” the Deputy Chief Constable could require. A crime has demonstrably taken place, which was initially indignantly denied by the SNP, only to be subsequently publicly admitted by the First Minister AFTER the police investigation had concluded.

?

An admission after the investigation is plainly new evidence – indeed, it’s far more than mere evidence. You don’t need to investigate any more if a representative of the perpetrators has admitted to the crime.

Whether it was Police Scotland or COPFS who determined that embezzlement had not taken place, that decision has now been clearly exposed as wrong by John Swinney’s admission. All that remains to be established is who specifically was responsible, and that one isn’t hard to figure out – it was whoever was running the SNP at the time. The party leader is responsible for the executive decisions of the party.

A great deal now rests on the answers to those two FOIs. We have a degree of confidence that we’ll get answers, because the Information Commissioner is just about the only public servant in Scotland still committed to doing his job with decency, competence, integrity and professionalism.

It matters because as it stands, the grim truth is that the idea of Scotland being in a fit state to become an independent nation again is a child’s fantasy.

If you don’t have justice as a cornerstone of your society, and especially if those in power are completely above/in control of the law, you have nothing worth fighting for.