Wings Over Scotland | The Lord Of The Rings

John Swinney knows the rules. He can’t pretend he doesn’t.

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So let there be no mistake: if Police Scotland and the Crown Office refuse to investigate the First Minister’s open public confirmation this week that a serious crime was committed by the SNP over the “ring-fenced” fundraiser money from 2017 and 2019, it will be beyond any fair dispute that Scotland is a corrupt banana republic where the powerful and the elite can simply do whatever they want, as brazenly as they like, and the law will turn a blind, uncaring eye.

That the prosecutorial service of a nation is run by a government minister answerable to a political party leader has always been a source of embarrassment. It makes Scotland look like a tinpot dictatorship, a North Korea-style state where a huge artifice of pantomime is constructed to disguise the fact that the country is a naked plutocracy.

That’s an opinion increasingly widely shared in Scotland.

That editorial leader from today’s Scottish Sun is speaking for every single person of integrity and decency left in the country. We have prima facie evidence that a crime has been committed – the misappropriation (at a minimum) of well over half a million pounds. We know exactly who did it, and they’ve confessed unambiguously and openly in public, in front of news cameras. Multiple properly-constituted complaints have been filed. And yet despite a five-year investigation, nobody has been prosecuted for it and we haven’t even been given the most cursory explanation of why.

And there are growing suspicions too, that the one person who WAS convicted over an entirely separate crime which indirectly led from the investigation might be about to be let off incredibly leniently for it.

Natalie McGarry was sentenced to almost two years in prison for embezzling £25,000. If Peter Murrell is handed a shorter prison term (or even no prison term at all) later this month – with the nation helpfully distracted by Scotland’s World Cup campaign – for stealing more than EIGHTEEN TIMES as much as McGarry did, on the grounds that he’s paid back the money to the people who also committed a crime with it, it will be a scandal of unprecented proportions in the history of Scottish justice, save perhaps the case of the Lockerbie bomber.

It was revealed this week that Murrell’s assets include a £613,000 pension fund. It is entirely conceivable that Murrell’s embezzlement contributed significantly to the size of that fund, which will have earned a very significant sum in interest over the years that he was stealing large amounts.

So by the time you also factor in the selling of all his illegally-obtained trinkets, it’s within the bounds of possibility that even after paying back the money, Murrell will come out of the deal financially ahead. The SNP, meanwhile, will have been fully reimbursed for its losses and will be the happy recipients of a welcome and substantial unexpected boost to their threadbare coffers.

The only people who will have lost out will be the people – supporters of all parties and none – who donated to a fund that was specifically, explicitly and stridently advertised as being for Scottish independence and NOT for general SNP purposes, and instead saw it spent on the latter.

And ever-useless, the Scottish media is allowing Swinney to dodge that issue and focus solely on donations from SNP members – the only donors to the “ring-fenced” funds who might reasonably be imagined to accept the money being spent on broader SNP interests.

(Coincidentally, a study today revealed that less than half of 2014 Yes voters voted SNP at last month’s election, with a whopping 31% of them voting for Unionist parties. “The SNP” and “independence” are not synonyms.)

Operation Branchform made front-page headlines across the globe, so it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the world is watching to see the outcome of the new complaint lodged with Police Scotland and the Crown Office yesterday.

If there is to be no rule of law for the powerful in Scotland, if we are to be revealed as the only bent dictatorship in the world where the idiot population keeps voting for the crooked dictators of their own genuine free will, then that is something that the rest of the planet will notice, and then turn their faces away from our shame.