The Alex Salmond trial

llwyd said:
Well, it sounds plausible that they first tried to save Salmond but then their hand was forced by the process, and after that the falling out happened. Now the initial complaint is barely remembered and all attention is on this SNP civil war, but I always found those original accusations quite credible.
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Quite a lot of things sound credible at first but then, when the evidence comes out, turn out to be a load of hogwash.

Now I realise this is a podcast that's nearly an hour long. I probably wouldn't listen to such a thing if someone linked to it, except I did just listen to this one. The point is that it explains the actual background to the most serious (and some of the trivial) allegations in a similar way that I have tried to do earlier in the thread. So if hearing it rather than reading it, and hearing it from someone who isn't me, is your thing, fill your boots.


Disclaimer. I don't like Craig Murray, I never have. For various reasons including his predisposition to believe poorly evidenced conspiracy theories. But people are complicated, few people are wrong all the time, and Mr Murray happens to be right this time and what's more to have the cojones to keep speaking out about it despite repeated threats of imprisonment.

He's only narrating what is in the public domain about the original allegations against Alex Salmond, but he does it in an accessible way. He also points out a number of allegations that are going round which aren't true at all.
 
That does sound just a little bit like "Craig Murray happens to be right when he's on my side of the argument".......
 
Looks like next Monday-Wednesday will be "interesting times" (to paraphrase the Chinese saying)

I'd say that if Sturgeon survives next week, she'll cling on (in the absence of any further evidence against her, of course). And I also think that the opposition parties ought to think very carefully about how they approach next week, if they want to effect the ousting of Sturgeon.


Incidentally, I think it's very far from improbable that Sturgeon and her people themselves (via the SNP MSPs on the committee) leaked the 5-4 verdict. After all, the "leak" enabled Sturgeon to get out in front in the media cycle, rather than having to be reactive, which is always a weak position; and it enabled Sturgeon to get her self-righteous "the committee had pre-judged me and was biassed against me" stuff in good and early.
 
I also wonder idly whether Sturgeon might possibly have had early sight of the Hamilton Report's conclusions. If, for example, she'd known last Thursday that Hamilton was going to clear her, it would make perfect sense for her to engineer the "leaking" of that 5-4 Holyrood verdict.

And, lest we forget, the Hamilton Report was commissioned by........ Deputy First Minister and SNP Sturgeon disciple John Swinney.
 
The country is corrupt when multiple decisions which don't involve juries fly in the face of the evidence in order to protect the powerful and the establishment. Juries are a wild card.
 
I have to say, I found Hamilton's "reasoning" in the critical areas to be..... *interesting*.

Most notably, he boldly states that he's satisfied that Sturgeon's "lapses in memory" - especially wrt that earlier meeting re Salmond's conduct - were all genuine (as opposed to lies), on the basis that........

...... he can't personally think of any good reason why she'd have deliberately pretended to forget!


That aside, one thing I think that may be getting swept aside in certain sections of the media (including some of the UK national media) is that Hamilton's remit was nothing more or less than establishing whether there was sufficient evidence to prove that Sturgeon had knowingly broken the ministerial code.

And once Sturgeon - a very astute and very well-advised Sturgeon, who knows these games very well - went with the blanket "I don't recall" approach (and her beautifully-Machiavellian spin-off of "I really wish I could remember, but I can't!"), there was actually always little to no chance - absent a real smoking gun, which there was not* - that Hamilton could ever reach that burden of proof. To do so would have required him to make logical leaps greater than the one I describe above, but in the opposite direction.


I think that Sturgeon and her people choreographed this carefully and (from the standpoint of best-case outcomes for her) brilliantly. And the more I read about things this evening, the more I wonder whether a) Sturgeon knew of Hamilton's findings some time in the middle of last week, and b) she/they engineered the "leak" of the Holyrood Committee decision in order for her to plant the "they prejudged me" seed prior to the grand reveal of the Hamilton finding. Hmmmmm.


* I think Sturgeon and her allies made pretty sure of that up front. But Salmond may still have something to reveal wrt that....
 
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I think you're more or less right there. I'm also told there may be more moves to come yet but I really don't know what.

It's fairly astonishing the way Hamilton spins in Sturgeon's favour though.
 
Alex Salmond to take Scottish government to court again

Alex Salmond is to take fresh legal action over the conduct of the Scottish government's top civil servant.

The former first minister said Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans had failed to take responsibility for the botched handling of harassment complaints against him.

He said he had instructed his lawyers to bring proceedings in the Court of Session.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56513358
 
Don't you just love it when people who have no clue at all about another country's politics, or indeed its actual voting system, start to pontificate from a position of absolute ignorance...

Rolfe said:
I think some people need to refresh their memories about how the Scottish electoral system works. Far from splitting the vote, Alba may just have saved the SNP's constituency vote. Salmond was extremely emphatic about independence supporters voting SNP on the constituency vote, to the point he nearly persuaded me to do that. He may persuade a significant number of people who were utterly hacked off by the SNP's current and recent shenanigans to do that.

The SNP isn't going to get more than a couple of list seats anyway, possibly none at all. The split-vote danger here doesn't involve the SNP, it's between the five or so other independence-supporting parties vying for list votes. The actual point of this exercise is to push one of these parties (that is Alba) to the front of the queue by putting up a Big Beast as leader, in the hope that it will thus gather (nearly) all the pro-independence list vote and so prevent a damaging list-vote split.

Also, having one dominant party that thinks it can do what it likes because independence supporters have nobody else to vote for has proved to be a seriously bad idea.
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Rolfe said:
Don't you just love it when people who have no clue at all about another country's politics, or indeed its actual voting system, start to pontificate from a position of absolute ignorance...
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I love it when people totally miss the point and ignorantly start pontificating on their misunderstanding.


The fact that you think Alex Salmond is selflessly and heroically saving the SNP does not make it so.

He has formed a new party. If anyone leaves the SNP to join Alba who would not have otherwise left, it will reduce the SNP membership.

It is splitting up the party in the same way that the Protestant Church split up the Catholic one or more importantly Milton Keynes Dons split up the Wimbledon fan base..
My point was not about the combined appeal rather the reduction in membership of the original group..
 
I don't think he's selflessly and/or heroically saving the SNP at all. I think he happens to have a strategy which doesn't involve splitting the vote to the detriment of the SNP's electoral chances.

The people currently leaving the SNP in droves to join Alba (I'm teetering on the edge at the moment) weren't going to campaign for the SNP anyway, and possibly weren't even going to vote for them in the constituency vote. People are that hacked off. Paradoxically, having the leader of the credible list-only independence party saying, vote SNP for the constituency, might actually increase the SNP vote.

It's not about numbers of members or even activists, it's about where the votes go. Alba is trying to succeed mainly by capturing the list votes of SNP voters, which would have been wasted anyway. If anyone loses it's likely to be the Greens, who previously picked up a sizeable slice of independence voters who realised a list vote for the SNP probably wasn't going to elect a candidate anyway.

Frankly the SNP right now is a bin fire, and if this is the start of a rebalancing of Scottish politics to get rid of the careerists and seat-warmers and placemen and woke entryists it will be a very good thing. It's likely to take more than one election though.

Probably best take this to the Politics thread, which is kind of why I linked to that.
 
Tommy Sheridan has joined. Alba now has a convicted perjurer and an MSP who was suspended for anti-Semitism. It is not a great image start for the new party.
 
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