This is quite extraordinary:
Because what it amounts to is “Oh, if I have to tell the truth then I’m not coming”.
We had to read it carefully several times to check it really said what we thought it said. But it does. It says that Murrell is now “reluctant” to appear because people are trying to find out if he’s lying to them or not.
Craig Murray must be kicking himself that he didn’t think of simply declining to appear at his trial, due to start tomorrrow – in which he’s accused not of lying but of telling the truth, and faces possible imprisonment as a result.
Indeed, this seems like a reckless missed opportunity on the part of ANYONE accused of ANY crime. Who knew that not turning up to be questioned was an option? Could have saved Derek Bentley a lot of unpleasantness for a start.
Officially, committees of the Scottish Parliament have the power to compel witnesses to attend, on pain of committing a criminal offence, though what steps they can take to enforce that theoretical power and what the penalties are for non-compliance aren’t specified. Maybe it’s time someone found out.
Our attention was drawn to something else today too.
The interesting detail had to be pointed out to us, because we missed it first time:
It’s interesting because of this:
Every member of the SNP gets a vote in Leader/Depute Leader elections, and unlike Scottish Labour nobody gets multiple votes through being in trade unions or whatever. But just two months before that October 2016 vote the SNP was claiming to have 120,000 members.
So why did it only send out 103,000 ballot papers?
This site has regularly challenged Scottish Labour’s dubious claims about membership numbers. We don’t see why the SNP shouldn’t be held to the same standard. The party currently claims to have 126,000 members, but figures revealed in its 2019 accounts suggest that the true number is only actually 87,000.
We’d hoped that the culture of lies in the current SNP was a recent development, one brought about by the need to tell more and more untruths in an attempt to cover up its snowballing attempts to discredit and imprison its former leader. It’s starting to look like it’s been going on a lot longer than we feared.
