Wings Over Scotland | The Full Nelson

It actually can’t be overstated what extraordinary tweets these are.

That’s the editor of the conservative, ultra-establishment Spectator overtly linking to a doc that the Crown Workplace – the agent of the Queen herself – has threatened to prosecute the Scottish Parliament for publishing, and which has formally been deleted however is for some motive truly nonetheless accessible on the Parliament’s web site.

The Spectator is giving the Queen the finger. And that’s not even the mad bit.

The journal’s chairman obtained in on the act too.

This, after all, is the second time that publishers of Salmond’s proof on breaches of the Ministerial Code by the First Minister have been threatened with prosecution and potential imprisonment by the Crown Workplace.

The primary time was six weeks in the past, when this web site had solely printed Salmond’s authentic submission to the Hamilton inquiry (as vetted by his attorneys), The Spectator stole it off Wings and put it on their very own web site, and every week later the Crown Workplace despatched us each very menacing letters demanding it’s eliminated.

The Spectator redacted solely a single paragraph. We pulled the entire thing, as a result of the Crown Workplace has a considerable observe report of solely prosecuting supporters of Alex Salmond on contempt-of-court costs.

Wings can be in an especially troublesome place in such issues. The Spectator is a big journal and will simply brush off having a few its workplace computer systems seized by the police. However we all know from earlier expertise that if the police come spherical to Wings HQ – my residence – they’ll take every little thing in sight.

Final time they walked off with each desktop PC, each laptop computer, each pill and each cell phone within the property, after which hung onto them for a number of months, just as they’ve done with Mark Hirst.

In 2018 that was a surmountable downside – we simply went out and acquired extra. However how do you do this in the course of a lockdown when Currys and the Apple Retailer are closed? You’ll be able to solely store on-line, and the way do you get on-line once you don’t have any computer systems? A prosecution would shut Wings down fully and indefinitely, so we are able to’t take any probabilities.

However we digress. The Spectator has printed nearly everything of Salmond’s authentic submission for six weeks with out being prosecuted, having gone to the Excessive Courtroom to ascertain what was and wasn’t a breach of Girl Dorrian’s anonymity order, and now it’s very actively and publicly directing folks to the brand new model – which is actually the complete authentic NON-redacted one however with the paragraphs in a unique order.

It’s even gone to the difficulty of archiving it simply in case somebody on the Parliament DOES get up and take away it from the inquiry web site – a clearly deliberate, to the purpose of being provocative, additional publication of a “prohibited” doc.

Nelson’s tweet linking to the supposedly-deleted, supposedly-contemptuous model from final night time has been up, as we write this, for 5 and a half hours and but the Scottish Parliament has STILL not eliminated the doc from its web site and so far as we’re conscious the Crown Workplace has made no try to make it achieve this, or to inform Nelson to delete his tweet.

However what does that inform us? It tells us this: the hasty last-minute redaction of Salmond’s proof has completely nothing to do with defending the id of the complainers in opposition to him. Its sole goal is to make it unattainable for Salmond to provide proof in particular person to the inquiry tomorrow.

Certainly, we all know this doubly, as a result of it’s solely the redaction that implies the id of of one of many complainers in any respect.

The proof itself – which had as soon as extra been extensively vetted beforehand by attorneys – made no discernible reference to anybody being a complainer. However redacting passages which all check with a selected particular person on the precise grounds that they may determine a complainer, whereas making certain that folks can nonetheless see the unique model and observe by comparability which names have been eliminated, is like placing up a giant flashing neon signal with large arrows pointing straight at them.

So let’s simply spell that out once more: the Crown Workplace has successfully straight recognized a complainer to anybody who desires to search out out, and has then ensured that that identification stays within the public area, with no doable different goal than making it unattainable for Alex Salmond to provide any helpful proof to the inquiry about Nicola Sturgeon’s breaches of the Ministerial Code, on ache of his being prosecuted by… the Crown Workplace… for… figuring out complainers.

We’ve simply learn that sentence again to ourselves 3 times and it doesn’t get any much less loopy with repetition.

The Crown Workplace – led by the Lord Advocate, who can be a minister of the Scottish Authorities which is the topic of the inquiry – is a catastrophically corrupt and damaged entity which now appears to be completely, rabidly uncontrolled.

It’s rampaging round Scotland burning actually tens of tens of millions of kilos of public cash on malicious prosecutions (which for anybody else, by the way, could be a prison act), and repeatedly interfering with an inquiry of the Scottish Parliament by serving to the First Minister and her associates conceal a possible prison conspiracy.

The Crown Workplace has Scottish democracy and accountability in a lethal, apparently inescapable neckhold, and it doesn’t seem like answerable to anybody for something.

If that doesn’t scare the residing daylights out of you, readers, we’d recommend you may must open your eyes a bit. As a result of it positive scares hell out of us.

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