In the political realm the word ‘honour’ and ‘honourable’ is associated with ‘the other side’ from me. It was a One Nation Tory kind of thing, an overhang from the medieval courtly tradition in which aristocrats could be identified based on their ‘better breeding’. And yet the concept of honour is one that is very close to my heart. It describes how I believe people should conduct themselves in public. Honourably.
And that is why I am now tending towards support for a public inquiry into the SNP and the Murrell affair generally. Let me be unequivocal – I have genuine concerns about a parliament choosing to look into the business of a political party. It is a troubling precedent in a number of ways. And yet my instinctive objection comes with a condition – that those involved act honourably.
I am against compelling disclosure of party political matters in this way but only because I expect political parties to act honourably and hold themselves to the kind of standards of accountability that match the seriousness of a public inquiry.
What I most certainly do not believe is that a political party which puts itself forward to run our lives should somehow be ‘free to be corrupt if we want to be – that’s our business’. I do not agree. I think corruption should be a disqualifying feature for a political party. I think it is a threshold of what I’d call ‘acceptable public behaviour’ below which a party seeking government should not fall.
Which is to say that it is incomprehensible to me that the SNP leadership genuinely thinks it can get away with pretending that ‘lessons have been learned’, and if that is the stance they insist on maintaining then in that circumstance and that circumstance alone I am now tending to support a parliamentary inquiry. I can accept self-policing, but not the right to self-declare impunity.
Let me briefly outline my concerns about the honour of the SNP. John Swinney says the party held a governance review to address the problems, except that is not true. The governance review was a whitewash in which critical voices were bullied off the review group. You can read its outputs yourself – it most certainly doesn’t address the criminality of Murrell.
So then you can look at Swinney’s ‘package of measures’ (like requiring more than one signatory on large expenditure). He wants you to believe these were an outcome of a review, but they were no such thing as you can see if you’ve read the preceding document. They are an arse-saving PR exercise rushed out after the verdict to try and head off calls for an inquiry.
The problem in the SNP was never rules and procedures (though they should have been stronger), it was democracy and culture
And the reason that lacks honour is that Swinney (and all the rest of them) know that the problem in 2019 was not at all that there were no financial controls but that the party leadership was running something akin to a cult mindset in which Sturgeon could ask the National Executive Committee to back her in actively ignoring the rules, checks, balances and accountability measures that were supposed to be in place – and the NEC said ‘fine, no bother’.
That is nothing to do with procedure. Procedurally, SNP HQ should have handed over the bank statements to the Finance and Audit Committee but refused to. Procedurally the NEC should have forced the handover of those documents but was bullied out it by Sturgeon. Had procedures been followed, Murrell would have been caught.
So what on god’s green earth should make anyone believe that the SNP will not just overrule its new procedures? Because they promise they won’t, like they promised there was nothing to see in 2019? Like they promised over and over the fundraiser money was ring fenced for its purpose? Lie after lie and they think this is good enough?
The problem in the SNP was never rules and procedures (though they should have been stronger), it was democracy and culture. And in that regard Swinney has done nothing but make a bad situation much worse. What his governance review really did was centralise power even further by making it all but impossible to challenge a sitting leader.
And what he is doing now is a mirror image of Sturgeon’s ‘wheesht for the SNP’ routine. He has forfeit any reason for us to assume his honesty or his honour on this issue. He is yet again sacrificing everything to save the sorry legacy of Nicola Sturgeon.
There were always things about this case that merit a public inquiry. I didn’t favour it looking at the SNP’s internal business (assuming they would), but someone needs to look at the Crown Office. I find it impossible not to conclude that it has made a series of genuinely dubious decisions which appear political.
The net effect of every decision taken has been to build a ‘one bad apple’ narrative and to scapegoat Murrell to save Sturgeon. She should have been charged and the police are hardly hiding their anger that she hasn’t been charged (or not in private they’re not). That is enough to call an inquiry right there.
Likewise the passing of information in the case to the Scottish Government which was clearly an interested party which had no policy locus in the case. Likewise with the delays that pushed an open-and-shut case way past the Scottish election. That bothers me a lot. It does.
But it is the charging decisions I think need looked at. Not only was Sturgeon not charged but all the charges that would appear to implicated her in ‘reset’ were also suppressed, again building a ‘one bad apple’ narrative. And then worst of all, I think you are all misreading the police statement on the fundraiser money.
I have been assuming that the police are speaking in code for a while now. When they said ‘we’re getting pushback from the Crown Office to back off this investigation’ alarm bells should have been ringing (can’t find the link – was an off-the-record briefing to the Sunday Times). Then when they said ‘eh, we handed the report over months ago’ I assume they were saying ‘this delay looks as dodgy to us as it does to you’.
Then the police said they were not going to reopen the investigation into the donation money and you all read this either as ‘corruption!’ or ‘see, nothing illegal!’. What I suspect the police are really saying is ‘we investigated this to within an inch of its life, tied it up in a neat bow for an easy prosecution and the Crown Office plea-bargained it away so there is nothing else we can investigate’.
Political parties are the organising structure of our democracy and ‘we can steal your money and there’s not a thing you can do about it’ is patently toxic
If I’m right it is yet again it is a controversial decision which has the main specific purpose of quarantining responsibility solely with Murrell and handing Sturgeon a shield of impunity (she was the accountable officer for the donations).
Any one of the above I could take as ‘just a decision’. One or two of them? Perhaps a coincidence. All of them? That is six or seven questionable decisions in a row, all protecting Sturgeon and the Scottish Government, not a single action by the Crown Office pushing in the opposite direction.
And for what it’s worth, I’d quite like to see a little look at the accountants here as well. You would barely know this in the modern world but the first duty of an accountant is to the public good, not their client. The SNP’s accountants resign in 2023, only after Murrell was charged. And yet the highest levels of theft took place well before then. What made them miss it, and then suddenly see it when the police appeared?
Here is the problem; it is not just the SNP that the SNP is damaging. They are damaging democracy. They want the right to act without honour and yet be untouchable and unaccountable at the same time. I have been gathering information and everything I’m hearing in terms of denial, paralysis and paranoia is worse even than I suspected. They think this has now passed and people are starting to forget.
Political parties are the organising structure of our democracy and ‘we can steal your money and there’s not a thing you can do about it’ is patently toxic. Nor is this a generic matter. The Scottish Greens are yet again acting as an adjunct to SNP corruption. This was such a bad look they’re now trying to open this up to be an inquiry about everyone.
That isn’t credible – or honest or honourable. A political party in this country has allowed its Chief Exec to steal money, it bullied and forced out whistleblowers, subverted its own rules, openly took steps to suppress the right of their transparency mechanisms to have access to needed information, stole money raised in a fundraiser (after denying it for a decade) – and now they’re saying there is not a thing you can do about it so fuck you? I support an inquiry into precisely every party for whom these conditions are true…
I would oppose an inquiry into an honourable party which recognised it failed collectively and undertook serious, independent scrutiny of how it happened. I would allow a political party to clean itself up. I would still like a serious look at the Crown Office, but a party taking its responsibility seriously should be left to do it in good faith.
Quite unbelievably we have a governing party which thinks it need answer to no-one on anything. That is an affront to our democracy and to the standards I think we should expect in public life. And on that basis, it they won’t investigate themselves, an investigation must be forced on them. It is a bad precedent, but not half as bad as the alternative.
Trust in democracy is hanging by a thread. This is why. It isn’t good enough. Not nearly, not close, not ever.