The average rape sentence in Scotland is seven years, so to get six years plus three years’ supervision for the technically lesser crime of sexual assaults means they must have been pretty grim.
So we know that Cameron Downing is a very bad man. Which does rather invite the question of why he was so popular in the SNP.
The first of those three pics is a particularly enlightening one, and features a whole host of people who will be familiar to Wings readers.
On the left is Declan Blench, a former National Secretary of the SNP’s controversy-dogged “Out For Independence” affiliate, for which Downing was also an officer.
Blench was one of the young transactivists who triggered Nicola Sturgeon’s infamous “broom cupboard” video in January 2021 by resigning from the party in a huff because it wasn’t trans-friendly enough.
(And who Sturgeon personally begged to return to the party and stand as a councillor. He did, and now represents the unfortunate people of Glasgow East Centre.)
The blond man hugging Blench is Cameron Downing, who’s now starting his six-year sentence in HMP Saughton. Next to them is Lee Robb, staffer and policy advisor to a whole slew of SNP Parliamentarians, most notably being Chief Of Staff to the recently-unseated Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith.
(Perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, Robb jumped ship just before the election after nine years in politics, and now deploys his talents at a PR company.)
Next along is Josh Mennie (fleetingly known as Aaron-Mennie when he was trying to sneak to the top of an alphabetical ballot paper), a bit-part actor in numerous Wings posts but still most famous for boasting of his fondness for invading women’s toilets.
The large lady next to Mennie, sticking out like a sore thumb among the youth, is a truly poisonous character by the name of Morag Fulton, whose social media is so gruesomely intolerant and hateful that her bio actually links not to a personal website but to a disclaimer page stating that even though she has “SNP” in her username and as the first word in her description, nothing she says is the SNP’s fault.
(Fulton is one of those people who advocates “diversity” of everything except opinions. You can be any size, shape, creed or colour, but if you don’t believe every single thing she believes you’re a far-right bigot Nazi and don’t deserve to speak.)
And finally at the front we have Rhiannon Spear, a serial failed careerist who’s tried everything to advance herself in the SNP but keeps being doggedly rejected by the party’s members. She was kicked out as Women’s Convener in the “good guys” NEC election of 2020, but snuck back into the position unelected a few months later when the leadership succeeded in driving the winner, Caroline McAllister, out of the party.
Spear also unsuccessfully tried to get elected to Holyrood on the regional list for the Highlands & Islands region, despite living in central Glasgow, but is perhaps still best known for bringing sex workers into Glasgow City Chambers while she was an SNP councillor, despite it still being the Scottish Government’s official stated policy that sex work is violence against women.
Oddly, this liberal attitude towards sex didn’t extend to a colleague on Glasgow City Council when a picture of a woman in a bikini was tweeted by his account (he blamed hackers), with Spears saying she was “infuriated I have to work in the same building as this man” and demanding his resignation.
Responding to the tweet with a chain of “love” emojis was Fiona Robertson, to whom alert Wings readers will definitely need no introduction, but whose biggest contribution to (the destruction of) Scottish civic life was almost certainly her obsessive quest to push through the SNP’s all-encompassing definition of “transphobia”.
She was another big fan of Downing’s (and another Out For Indy stalwart).
The event that all are referring to appears to be an alcoholic celebration of the life of Leeze Lawrence, a violent, abusive, racist trans-identifying drug dealer who died at the age of 39 from never-stated causes in June 2021, and who Nicola Sturgeon described as “a force for good”.
We assume Sturgeon is enjoying Leeze’s rapier wit in that pic.
Leeze, coincidentally, was also the Gender Identity And Expression Officer at Out For Independence, a role that Cameron Downing took over from him.
And in the other two tweets we find perhaps Downing’s most ardent admirer in the SNP, the spectacularly brainless Banff & Buchan MSP Karen Adam.
Now, we were naturally curious to discover all these people’s reactions to Downing’s conviction and sentencing – whether they had any regrets, whether they’d ever suspected anything, whether there was anything they’d learned from their association with him. But sadly we didn’t have much luck.
Spear’s Twitter account was “protected” – ie locked down and private – until yesterday, but as of this morning has been “deleted”. (Spear does this regularly when the subject of uncomfortable attention, we’re sure it’ll return again.)
Josh Mennie’s is protected too.
Declan Blench obliterated his entire Twitter history when he became a councillor, for reasons which were entirely obvious to anyone familiar with his output.
Karen Adam also deleted hers completely last year after being pressured by the media over her connections to Downing.
But not before indignantly insisting that she “spoke to” Downing about his threats, which she evidently regarded as an end to the matter.
Although curiously, we are in fact unable to locate a single quote from Adam issuing any sort of condemnation of him anywhere. No media has reported one, and of course we can no longer check Adam’s Twitter to verify her claim.
But what’s really interesting about the Downing story are the timings. His infamous tweets were made in September and October 2020.
At the time of the first of them, Downing was already an Equalities Officer in the SNP, at an unspecified branch in Edinburgh.
They weren’t publicly exposed until a couple of months later, when with tremendous irony Downing was trying to get elected to the SNP’s Conduct Appeals Committee – supported by Kat Cary, another figure from the party’s hardcore transactivist wing and a sometime columnist for The National, who was standing as Women’s Convener, the role twice vacated by Rhiannon Spear.
But that’s still, extraordinarily, a full nine months BEFORE Downing was elected to a SECOND Equalities Officer role in the party, this time with the London branch (to which he’d been introduced by Karen Adam).
(Downing is to the immediate left of Alyn Smith in that picture, with Josh Mennie and Karen Adam to Smith’s right.)
The media picked up on the story in October that year after it had been covered weeks earlier by blogs including Yours For Scotland and Wings.
But astoundingly Downing wasn’t sacked from his role – let alone expelled from the party – and instead voluntarily resigned three months later. Until he was charged by the police he remained very much persona grata within the SNP.
(It’s noteworthy to contrast that with the instant expulsions handed out to those who were neither convicted of nor admitted any wrongdoing, like Alex Salmond, Neale Hanvey, Mark McDonald, Michelle Thomson and many more.)
But curiously, although he’s been remanded in custody since his conviction a month ago, someone locked Downing’s account – which had still been readable with all the evidence to prove that fact – in the last 24 hours.
Everyone in the SNP is very, very keen to escape scrutiny for the role they played in enabling Cameron Downing’s crimes. Everyone who associated with him is cowering in a bunker. The party has issued no statement about how its vetting managed to fail so badly not just once but twice, even AFTER his abusive tweeting had been exposed.
They’re far from the only people with questions to answer. The beleaguered Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre appears to have been fooled by Downing’s false blackmail rape claims into giving him access.
We’re sure he received a warm welcome from the Centre’s male chief executive Mridul Wadhwa, although readers may be chilled at the thought of such a dangerous and violent predator being placed in such close proximity to vulnerable victims.
Though at least they might have been able to point him out to police, given that his portrait had hung in the National Gallery Of Scotland for the entire time that he was committing his series of assaults.
(Alert readers will doubtless have noticed the swooning of Karen Adam MSP over the painting, several months after Downing’s tweets had been exposed, illustrating the point that he had in no way been ostracised by the party elite.)
But unfortunately that sort of thing is very much standard in Scotland under the current SNP. We suppose it’s no great surprise that nobody in the party wants to answer for it, or take any responsibility, because there’s no easy way to blame it on Westminster.
(Although it IS somewhat surprising, to say the least, that at the time of writing the BBC has not, as far as we’re able to ascertain, carried a single word of coverage about either Downing’s conviction last month or sentencing yesterday, nor come to that about his arrest and charging. Though to be fair it can’t have much spare time left over after fulfilling its quotas for literally hundreds of very important stories about drag queens.)
Downing is of course just the latest in a long line of party officials to be found guilty of, or admit to, sexual assault and/or harassment. He joins Jordan Linden, Patrick Grady, Derek Mackay and others in a growing catalogue of shame, and everyone connected with Scottish politics knows there are several more about which nothing can be said legally until such times as arrests are made.
(Assuming the SNP’s attempts to cover them up fail again.)
The people named in this article are, tragically, a wholly representative sample of the character of the Scottish National Party in 2024, and in those circumstances it seems highly unlikely that we’ve yet reached the end of the damaging revelations.
We can only hope that there’s nothing worse than Cameron Downing to come.
