An examination of the latest Hullaba-Stew

Never one to resist an exercise in utter futility, the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger has attempted to resuscitate a correspondence with the Chief Constable and the Crown Office that has clearly already been closed.  What is perhaps more disturbing is that he has issued a fairly clear threat to get his readers and their money directly involved in the futility by crowdfunding a judicial review bid - which would likely be a repeat of the "Wings Of Justice" calamity when Stew's readers were coaxed into chucking eye-watering amounts of cash down a bottomless pit in pursuit of a hopeless vanity-driven defamation case against Kezia Dugdale.  That said, it was for the most part good independence supporters who had their money wasted on the Dugdale case, whereas the dwindling ranks of Stew Devotees that remain now are far more likely to be neo-unionists and soft fascists, so perhaps it won't be quite so harmful this time if tens of thousands of pounds are sucked into the black hole of Loyalty To The Great One.

You don't actually need to be any sort of legal expert to understand why Stew is completely wasting his time here - just elementary logic and basic common sense is enough to tell you that he's arguing on an obviously false premise.  He claims that it is "chronologically impossible" for the police to have already investigated the implications of John Swinney's recent statement about how the ringfenced indyref funds were spent, because Operation Branchform concluded before that statement was made.  But here's the thing - it's absolutely *not* "chronologically impossible", indeed it's overwhelmingly likely, that either Mr Swinney or others of seniority within the SNP will have earlier made an identical statement in private to the police.  Of course the police will have asked where the money went, and of course that question will have been answered.  If that answer was investigated to the police's satisfaction, there plainly doesn't need to be a repeat of the investigation simply because Mr Swinney has repeated the answer in public.

Why would the police have been satisfied with the answer?  Probably because it touches on such a grey area.  If you fundraise for an independence referendum, is it reasonable to spend some of that money by doing preliminary/preparatory campaigning for independence years in advance of any referendum being called?  It might well be, but that's in the eye of the beholder.  It's not clear-cut.  The question the police may have been asking themselves is whether a court could be sure that any reasonable person would definitely take the opposite view, and of course that certainty was never going to be there.

For what it's worth, my own personal view is that Mr Swinney would have been better advised to answer the question about the funds by saying that all of the relevant decisions were made by the previous leadership and that it wasn't for him to second-guess them - all he could answer to was the current financial situation and how funds would be spent from now on.  He didn't need to assume responsibility for decisions he didn't actually take - but even having done that, I don't think it's going to do much long-term harm to either himself or the SNP, because it looks increasingly unlikely that any legal complications will occur.

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Catch up with my recent YouTube videos: 

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