Branchform’s meagre fruit

It cost £2.3 million, it lasted four years. It originated in a politically motivated complaint from a notorious attention seeker with a habit of making nuisance complaints to the police, but Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform has finally come to an end – without any charges being brought against former first minister Nicola Sturgeon or former SNP Treasurer Colin Beattie.

Both have been cleared by this protracted and expensive police investigation which despite thousands of man-hours of investigation by experienced and senior detectives, murder tents, and the seizure of many kilogrammes of documentation, failed to find any evidence of wrong-doing against them. Branchform has without a doubt had a significant impact on Scottish politics, being in part responsible for the SNP’s catastrophic defeat in last year’s Westminster general election.

The investigation has caused equally significant damage to the reputation of Police Scotland with many people who are not prone to conspiracy theorising wondering why the police have spent so much time,effort, and public money investigating a case which involves relatively trivial sums of money, up to and including parking murder tents in the former first minister’s front garden in full view of a Scottish media ecstatic in an orgy of SNPbad which eagerly broadcast the proceedings live. It even made them lose attention on the ferries. All this has led to widespread suspicions that the police have allowed themselves to be politicised. That’s a stench of suspicion, which whether it is right or wrong, will linger on Police Scotland for years to come.

The former first minister’s now estranged husband Peter Murrell has been charged with embezzlement. We are still awaiting the precise details of these charges and as this remains a live case I would strongly urge extreme caution about commenting on this aspect of the investigation. I would also remind anyone commenting here that you are personally responsible for any comments you leave. The court proceedings against him have only just begun, and it is entirely likely that they will not have concluded by the time of the next Scottish elections in May next year, casting the baleful influence of Branchform over yet another Scottish electoral cycle. Insert your favourite conspiracy theory here.

The news from Police Scotland that the former first minister had been cleared came – entirely coincidentally of course – within days of Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement that she will not be seeking re-election to Holyrood at the next Scottish elections in May 2026. Police Scotland are terribly good at laying suspicions of a stitch up to rest.

Proving how good they are at this, and also entirely coincidentally, the news came on the very same day that Sturgeon’s estranged husband, Peter Murrell, made a private and routine appearance in court in Edinburgh, which the press mysteriously found out about, conveniently – and again entirely coincidentally – allowing the Scottish media to run with more negative headlines about the SNP despite the fact that they had been deprived of the prospect they had been salivating about for so long, seeing the former first minister arraigned on criminal charges.

It’s quite possible that Peter Murrell’s trial will entirely coincidentally start as campaigning gets underway for the next Holyrood election.

But as far as media gotchas of Nicola Sturgeon are concerned, all those hours of coverage of murder tents have been for naught. That sound of distant swearing you can hear is Pacific Quay hastily cancelling the hour-and-a-half long special it had been planning on the downfall of Sturgeon. Thoughts and prayers to Glenn Campbell and Kaye Adams.

The BBC and the anti-independence media, the Unionist froth-bots, and the Alba supporters who were drooling over the prospect of seeing their nemesis in the dock and facing criminal charges that could potentially have landed her in jail for years, have now had that whipped away from them.

The news that Police Scotland had failed to find any evidence of wrong-doing by Nicola Sturgeon despite a four-year-long investigation costing four times more than the amount of cash that was the subject of the investigation was met with wailing, gnashing of teeth, and fury from the frothing outrage geysers of über-Unionism on social media and the raging conspiracy theorists. These types are either demanding that Nicola Sturgeon be locked up anyway, or are insisting that she was always going to ‘get away’ with the crimes they are certain she committed on account of her being a CIA or British Intelligence agent who is simultaneously a lesbian and a misogynist. Many of these accounts could now be liable for defamation.

Nicola Sturgeon had announced a few days before the news broke that she had been cleared of suspicion that she did not intend to seek re-election in May 2026 and would be spending her time out of the glare of publicity, although she did state that she hoped to continue to make a contribution to the cause of independence.

She absolutely deserves having some time to herself, few politicians have had to endure such a barrage of hatred and intrusion into her private life as she has, much of which was made even harder to bear as it came from people who were supposedly on the same side as her. However I would love it if she now announced that she had changed her mind and would be standing for Holyrood after all, if only to be able to watch all the usual suspects go into meltdown.

The news that Nicola Sturgeon and Colin Beattie have been cleared came just as things are starting to look much more positive for the SNP. Even in opinion polls which maintain the highly questionable practice of weighting by the results of an eleven year old referendum, the SNP and the Scottish Greens appear set to maintain a pro-independence majority in Holyrood. Last week, in two Glasgow council by-elections, the SNP significantly out-performed their polling results and took two seats from a Labour party whose support is in freefall. These by elections were the first electoral test since Labour’s shameful attack on the disabled and chronically ill. Labour’s support collapsed. Next week the Chancellor is set to introduce more swingeing cuts to public spending, ushering in a new era of austerity.

Back in early 2024 when it was obvious that Labour would win the next Westminster general election and the SNP would be punished at the ballot box due to the political fall out from Operation Branchform, I predicted that by the time of the next Scottish elections, Labour would be very unpopular indeed. That has come to pass, but even I did not expect just how unpopular Labour would become, and how quickly it would happen.

The fall in Labour’s support has not bottomed out yet. It will fall even more as public anger grows over the cuts Reeves will announce next week and the ramifications of the recent cuts to disability and sickness benefits are felt. The cuts to disability benefits are Labour’s Poll Tax moment. It normally takes a few years for a government to destroy public trust in it, Labour has managed it in a few months. Once gone, that trust is very difficult to get back.

The UK now has three right wing parties which attack the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable because they refuse to countenance raising taxes on the rich or boosting the economy by rejoining the EU. Independence is the only option left for those who want a fairer and better Scotland. It is now not beyond the bounds of possibility that the SNP might even win a majority in Holyrood in 2026, providing the party can motivate independence supporters to turn out and vote.

__________________________________________________

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £8 P&P within the UK. P&P to the USA or Canada is £18 and P&P to Europe is £14. P&P to Australia and New Zealand is £20. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £23 to [email protected] (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £8 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA or Canada is £18 and P&P to Europe is £14. P&P to Australia and New Zealand is £20. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to [email protected]  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at [email protected] for other means to pay.

Within Cornwall the map is available at Kowsva, 6 Artists Muse, Heartlands, Poll/Pool – The Kowethas shop. They are also available from The Cornish Store in Aberfala/Falmouth. Other outlets in Cornwall will follow soon.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address [email protected]. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug