When times are quiet in Scottish politics, as they currently are, our favourite genre of story is “mainstream press belatedly catches up with Wings Over Scotland”. And so to this morning’s front page splash in the Sunday Mail.
The rumour mill has been grinding about Operation Branchform developments again in the last few days, although we’ve seen too many false dawns now to get overly excited about that. But the Mail’s story sounded awfully familiar.
The key passages concern some questionable figures from the SNP’s 2020 accounts.
And those numbers might ring a bell with Wings readers. Because it was more than three years ago – in August 2021, to be specific – that we drew your attention to them.
We found the astronomical sums the SNP claimed to have spent on kitting out its Edinburgh HQ so unbelievable that we offered a Wings gold coin (notional value £500) to anyone who could construct a credible way for the listed costs to be achieved. And we never gave that coin away, because nobody managed to get anywhere close.
Unfortunately, there was nothing much else we could do to follow up the story. The SNP is a private organisation so FOI laws don’t apply to it, and nobody outside the party has any power to force it to explain its accounts (well, except for HMRC and the police, of course). All we could do was highlight it in the hope that party members – to whom the party is at least theoretically answerable – could seek an explanation.
But that didn’t happen, so it took another three years for the police to dig into it during the investigation – also triggered by Wings – into the missing fundraiser money.
(The Mail does acknowledge that the office story is a development of Branchform, but curiously forgets to credit who it was who “raised” the “concerns” that started it, and indeed who it was who “revealed the accounts were under scrutiny”, claiming the role for itself although it was in fact Wings who broke the story two days earlier.)
There are growing complaints from all sides at the amount of time Branchform is taking to resolve. But perhaps things would have moved a little faster if Scotland’s media had done more to pick up the stories this site has been breaking for years and try to get some answers.
It wasn’t as if it would have required much in the way of journalism. We’d already done the work for them. Our August 2021 piece bent over backwards to find a way to spend that much money kitting out a small 20-person office, and we just couldn’t do it. But Scotland’s mighty press sat on its hands and said nothing.
We all want to see the mystery of the SNP’s finances settled once and for all. But as we keep reminding you, the wheels of justice do turn, even when they take their time. Wings Over Scotland set them in motion way back in January 2020, and however agonising the pace and however badly the media failed to lend a hand with pushing (indeed, helped Scottish Government mandarins’ attempts at sabotage and stalling), almost five years later they’re still inching closer to their ultimate destination.
(You can buy a lot of compliance for £3 million.)
Patience is a virtue, folks. But it shouldn’t take much more now. As Ernest Hemingway famously said of financial catastrophe, things happen slowly, then all at once.
