Nicola Sturgeon didn't know her husband stole £400,000

[Imdunfer]

Really? She lived with this guy and didn't know? She had a camper van parked on the drive and didn't know he stole the money to buy it?

I don't buy it.

AIBU

But that power has now been removed.

This one has never made sense to me.

Murrell worked for Salmond for years. Salmond was very influential in the SNP when Murrell became CEO, and in his first spell as leader he said nothing. Then when Salmond came back for his second stint he ran with Nicola Sturgeon knowing that winning would see her as leader for a short time until he got a Scottish seat back, and then being deputy when he did.

They were mates until they fell out years later. He gave Murrell much of their power, he pushed Sturgeon into the limelight and made himself a pair with her.

Well, they said "no" to independence from the UK.
That's democracy for you.

Salmond is interesting because he’s the one who really made the SNP the force it was. Why he was so kind to Murrell when the man had stolen from him is something I would like to know. It doesn’t look like one off behaviour; and why a man like that was put in charge of party money is really mystifying!

The EU isn't really big on accepting states that are tapped out in market terms and bloated on welfare. They have enough of those already.

They are interested in taking on undeveloped markets like Ukraine and Turkey as a market for the cores (France, Germany) goods.

The only positive thing for them about Scotland joining is that it is a relatively small place, so won't have a huge effect either way on the EU. On Scotland the effect might be significant (both good and bad), but the EU isn't going to modify its policies for a micro state on the periphery.

There are another couple of weird things about an independent Scotland joining the EU, the first is giving up currency control as joining the EU it would be a requirement to join the EZ (I don't think the Nationalists had a clear idea on what was going to happen as regards currency at the last referendum). Controlling your own currency is a key feature of sovereignty, and if done well it can be advantageous (of course done badly it can be catastrophic). The second is that the EZ really needs to implement stricter fiscal controls such as budget balancing and whether Scotland would be able to achieve this and still achieve the level of welfare state it currently enjoys. At the moment the EU fiscal controls are not strongly implemented (putting the entire project at risk) but at some point another financial crisis will hit, and budget controls will become mandatory as the EU moves more towards a superstate.

To me Scottish independence to me now doesn't really seem like independence. It's more, we don't want to be part of the UK but part of the EU superstate instead. Of course framing it in those terms doesn't really stoke the "nationalist fervor" vote.

Edit : Maybe independent to choose which superstate we wish to be subservient to would be a better description.

Yes but what if in future the country changes its mind?

"The country" doesn't have a hive mind. However, what about the discontent over Brexit?
Do referendums continuously have to take place?
I take your point, but it could be a case of... we'll have a referendum until we get the right result?
A conundrum.
Edited for clarification.

And given the period Murrell is up for 2010-2022 Salmond was leader for the first part why, if he felt Murrell was a their, did he not say more or put more rigorous checks in place.

Whilst the party leader isn’t always the man in charge of the party overall at that point Salmond was the SNP. In 2011 they won the first ever majority in the Scottish Parliament, a massive feat given the whole thing was set up to try and prevent Nat one party getting a huge majority.

He had the power to keep Murrell under watch, and he certainly had the contacts to drip feed rumours if he wanted to get rid of him in a sneaky way. Yet he did neither.

I don’t think the people now coming out with the “well I can now say…” statements are realising that if Alex Salmond promoted, encouraged and publicly backed a thief for many years that actually reflects incredibly badly on Alex Salmond. It certainly doesn’t make him look wise or whatever they are aiming for.

Interesting points, @GasPanicparticularly about the EU and it's direction of travel.
As for fiscal unity, it's a pity that Scotland in the EU couldn't adopt the Bawbee as a suggested currency.

The SNP have been terrible for Scotland. The Scottish Education System was once the envy of the world; now it's in tatters. NHS Scotland's waiting lists are horrendous. Drug deaths in Scotland are amongst the highest, if not the highest, in Europe. Homelessness is out of control. Town and City centres are like Third World shanty towns, and are like open air asylums at weekends. Police Scotland is a skint, politically correct shambles.

The EU has to move closer to the superstate, because if it is not moving closer it is moving further apart, and the more apart the states move the more likely it will fail. There was a promise once put forward that "the UK will never become part of an EU superstate". This promise was unrealistic, both because no one can bind the UKs actions in perpetuity and because the EU has to become the superstate in order to survive, so at some point you either have to be part of that and in the EU or not.

During the GFC the EU came very close to failure, and there was much talk of moving the states closer together (in terms of fiscal policy) so that in the future similar events wouldn't happen. Unfortunately the will to do this only really occurs as a result of some financial crisis, and nothing was actually done apart from the usual platitudes. We are now in a state where some countries again are running very large deficits, and the consequences of that for stability and the future of the project are significant.

It's hard to say whether Scotland would be better off in the UK or the EU. One thing I would say is that the EU attempts to very much be like the Hotel California. You can check in, but you can never leave. It does this to ensure survival of the project. The UK only managed to get out by using its fingertips, I suspect that if we had been in it for another 10 years leaving would have been impossible (UK politicians didn't manage to hold off democracy/the referendum for long enough). Since it is impossible to check out, you need to be very certain that when you go in it is what you really really want to do - in other words clear and obvious benefits are apparent. If I was Scotland I would be wanting these clear and obvious benefits to be very apparent before leaving the UK and joining the EU, because it's a one way ticket. No, sorry we got that wrong, let's flip again in 10 years time.

Yes. Good points.

Good points, as you say, so many good things about Scotland. The people have been ill served.

They all know where the dead bodies are buried.

They’re all corrupt.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2059562495967113374.html

SEE YOUS ARE ALL CONFUSIN THE RUN O THE MILL DISHONESTY WI THE CRIMINAL DISHONESTY

I GAVE YEES THE BABY BOXES WHIT MAIR DE YEES WANT

Why didn’t they sack him? Why did they double down on it in effect? This makes no sense at all

The point the thread makes is that because Swinney and Sturgeon were desperately trying to gloss over/hide the fact that the ring fenced £600k had been spent on the 2017 election, Murrell was able to increase his embezzling.

In fact things really started to go off the rales after Wings started raising concerns.

Yes but that is actually far worse. Why would their instinct be to let him keep going? Their decisions are NBG, aren’t they? And that’s a generous way of putting it.

I still don’t understand why he had the job either, given his prior pilfering. It does not make any sense

Who said my opinion was based on embezzlement? It's based on the shitshow that is politics in Scotland under the SNP.

I think the suggestion is that they didn't know, but because they were trying to cover up the spending of the £600K it suited them to prevent any kind of scrutiny.

The absence of controls and transparency suited everybody, (at least everybody who wasn't trying to find out where the money had gone), and corruption thrives in that kind of culture.

I don't see how the two are connected. It's debatable whether spending the money raised for the referendum on a general election campaign was illegal. But that's not really the issue.

The main problem seems to be that one person had too much power within the party and had clearly figured out how to steal from it on a regular basis. I suspect the SNP as an organisation grew so fast that it never put in place the type of authorisations and audits that were required to manage a larger organisation. Their annual turnover went from being less than £1 million to over £5 million in a short space of time.

I think thats it exactly. He probably wasn't alone in acquiring stuff at SNPs expense.

But he was the one who got stupidly greedy and bought a motorhome, and a car.

The rest of it is small amounts of cash that disappeared over time.

The new (to me) information about the funds ringfenced for a vote of independence but actually spent on the general election does explain why the Leadership (under NS) was very keen to make sure no one looked at the party's finances in any detail. And it is plausible that Murrell saw that as an opportunity to ramp up what had been, until then, 'simple' misuse of a party credit card to much bigger thefts.

So for me it's more plausible that NS was unaware of the scale of the fraud, even though I remain of the believe that she knew that he was misusing his credit card because, I imagine, he wasn't the only one. Now absolutely that's because of a woeful lack of governance, and a also a sense of entitlement that runs through so many politicians..

I know somebody who almost lost everything because her husband stole nearly half a million from somebody. He ended up in prison, she divorced him and managed to keep her house, thankfully. Don't underestimate a person who is determined to pull the wool over another person's eyes. Just because it's improbable doesn't mean it's impossible.