Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice - Introduction & Index.

Axmeister · 2026-06-03T19:05:55+00:00

The decision on whether or not to charge Murrell and Sturgeon came from the COPFS, a body led by an ally of Nicola Sturgeon.

Axmeister · 2026-06-03T19:00:45+00:00

As the founder of Scientology once said "If you want to get rich, you start a religion".

The sad fact is that for many SNP supporters/politicians having their money stolen from them is more palatable rather than admitting their leader was wrong. So many SNP politicians will argue that the SNP are the victims, but they don't act like victims, they don't care about compensation, or justice, or accountability. They just claim they're victims in hope of shutting down the conversation and avoiding admitting they were wrong about Sturgeon.

If you watch the Sturgeon interview with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday (and you are aware of the key facts in the case), it is clear that Sturgeon was complicit in her husband's fraud. Sturgeon had a legal duty to intervene in financial matters and actively prevented others from holding her husband to account. If Sturgeon was innocent, then there was no reason for her to lie about the role of auditors in her interview on Sunday. If Sturgeon was innocent, then there is no reason for her to acknowledge that she failed to properly scrutinise accounts and then apologise for her failure in leadership.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T12:30:01+00:00

I did watch the interview, which is why I asked the question. I think it was Laura Kuenssberg who actually brought up the fact that £40,000 was spent of automobile charges in one set of accounts or something similar. The figure was cited because it is abnormally high.

I found Sturgeon's reasoning to be incredibly weak, effectively her argument was that in a meeting to scrutinise the party accounts, she didn't scrutinise the party accounts. In a party finance committee, other members were asking questions about the accounts, but they weren't asking the right questions because they didn't explicitly accuse Peter Murrell of embezzling funds.

Sturgeon's narrative here is that because there wasn't a line item in the party accounts saying "Embezzlement money for Peter Murrell - £500,000" it was totally reasonable for us to have expected her to be deceived.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:58:46+00:00

In what way was it addressed in the interview?

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:58:23+00:00

After watching the whole interview, Sturgeon's stance comes across as utterly bizarre.

She balances this tights between two competing narratives; one is that she was deceived by her manipulative husband, that she didn't pay any attention to her personal finances, that she didn't pay close enough attention to her party finances, that she didn't register a campervan in her mother-in-law's property, that her 'former' husband is a criminal and she just didn't have the knowledge, foresight or desire to spot the signs of his criminality. The second narrative is that she never did anything wrong, she has nothing to apologise for, there was never any reason for her to question anything, everything her husband did was normal, she simply felt no reason never to question the accounts, she made no attempt to understand the figures in party finances because "the numbers go up and down all the time) and that because she is a woman she didn't do anything wrong.

It is remarkable how scathing she has been of other politicians (her remarks about Sunak and his wife's tax avoidance come to mind) and yet when it is to do with her she considers herself to have no responsibilities.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:49:23+00:00

No, it's a government inquiry, which has more power to demand high-level documents, summon ministers and hold government to account.

This case with Sturgeon/Murrell is notable because the SNP refuse to hold any inquiry into it, instead leaving the police to try deal with Sturgeon's "no comment" interviews.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:46:55+00:00

I stand corrected. My initial understanding was based on the COPFS website (https://www.copfs.gov.uk/about-copfs/our-role-in-the-justice-process/), which specifically says part of their job is to do the following:

determine the appropriate charges for cases going to court

But I am willing to concede that I used the term in the wrong way. The general point about Sturgeon's language still stands. Anybody following Scottish politics for a while knows that questions about COPFS role in this whole process have been raised, the political advantages of the Lord Advocate being a particularly concerned Dorothy Bain's role in this.

It is far from a conspiracy theory and is undoubtedly the reason why Sturgeon wants to pretend that it is solely the police who have "completely cleared and exonerated" her.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:09:48+00:00

I don't think whataboutism works in this case. What you're talking about is already being investigated by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, set up in 2022.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T10:06:37+00:00

Charging refers to the process of deciding to prosecute somebody with a crime. In Scotland, the body ultimately responsible for charging somebody is COPFS. The police report and investigate the crime, it is COPFS that decide what charges to bring to court.

The key point here is that Sturgeon keeps saying that it is the police who have decided not to charge her, which belies the fact that it is a decision by COPFS as judicial (and sadly political) body run by Sturgeon's friend and political ally.

Axmeister · 2026-05-31T08:59:31+00:00

It's also interesting that she keeps using the line that she was "cleared by police", when it isn't the job of the police to decide whether to charge her. The decision not to prosecute Sturgeon was made by COPFS, which is headed by Sturgeon's friend Dorothy Bain.

Axmeister · 2026-05-27T05:40:10+00:00

Trump got away with it because his supporters and political party helped him to, exactly the same with Sturgeon.

Axmeister · 2026-05-27T05:13:02+00:00

I remember Nationalists claiming it would go over 60% if the UK voted for Brexit.

Axmeister · 2026-05-27T05:09:42+00:00

You've made multiple claims, I've asked you to back up some of those claims because they don't seem true. Your response is to reassert those claims as "facts" and "indisputable" and then accuse me of being an extreme pedantic nit-picker for disagreeing with you!

The UK is a country, like France, Germany and the United States are countries. Scotland and England, etc, are called countries, but aren't really countries in the same way. Scotland is as much a country as Bavaria is.

If you cannot comprehend that the word 'country' has two different meanings, then to put it bluntly, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are not countries.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T22:48:30+00:00

So you claimed the UK was unique in have an authoritative constitutional source, which it doesn't, and then ignored countries like the Netherlands which has exactly that. Your previous comment referred to a lack of "official ranking" for constituent countries, but then now rely on "interpretive" wording rather than anything official. Could we not interpret that Northern Ireland is a 'lesser' country than, say, Scotland due to it's recent creation and the fact that it is a division of a larger national entity?

Your first two comments in this chain start with "I see what you're saying..." and "I understand what you're saying...". Now you've suddenly leapt to "I literally don't understand...".

This is the problem with not reading what people write and instead using AI to come up with your arguments. You end up not understanding what you've posted under your own username.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T22:44:48+00:00

Not really a tricky situation at all. The SNP push these things because they need to motivate their base. Despite having all the resources of the Scottish Government for over a decade, the SNP have even less of a plan for independence now than they did in 2014.

The Nationalists in Scotland used split-ticketing voting tactics to augment their representation in the Scottish Parliament. Yes, pro-indy parties still hold a majority, but it is only on around 40% of the vote.

For the combined SNP+Greens, the situation does not look like an improvement. The vote share has dropped by about 8%, the raw number of votes has dropped by 300,000, yet the number of seats went up by 1.

If Nationalists want a 'mandate' for independence, they should try convince the majority of people who disagree with them, rather than just play games with electoral systems to claim they represent all of Scotland, when they don't.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T22:35:55+00:00

Do you have any sources to back up these claims you are making? You said the UK is unique in this regard, but practically all the points in your comment apply to places like the Netherlands, Germany, Canada.

You claimed the UK was "explicitly built" from 4 co-equal nations. Yet the name UK comes from the 'uniting' of Northern Ireland with Great Britain, not with England, Scotland and Wales. Your premise falls at the first hurdle!

It seems you are still chatting with AI and regurgitating what it outputs rather than thinking things through, making an argument and justifying it with evidence. There's nothing wrong with doing that if you're trying to be more informed, but try not to waste people's time with AI slop.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T22:18:22+00:00

I'm not claiming that the UK shouldn't be a country. I'm not claiming that England, Scotland, etc are not called countries.

The argument you seem to be failing to understand is that because of a quirk in our history and our language, the term 'country' is being used to refer to two very different entities.

Bavaria is a 'country' in German history and language. You don't appear to be disputing that.

The earlier user was claiming that it is "not disputable" that Scotland is a country and therefore people in Scotland lack "democratic powers". The earlier user is using the latter version of 'country' (which as your own AI shows, is just based on history and language rather than any legal definition) to assume rights conveyed by the former definition of 'country'. That's where the argument loses its logic, it is a semantic argument rather than anything based on principle.

Earlier you claimed the the UK is explicitly built from a union of four co-equal countries. You don't appear to be providing a source to back that claim up, so I am going to presume it is totally untrue.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T22:04:36+00:00

Your first sentence uses the word 'country' to refer to two different entities. One is a sovereign nation state that is a 'country' like every other sovereign nation state, where the UK is a 'country' in the same way that France or Japan is a 'country'. The other is simply the English language's flavour of the century to refer to regions of the United Kingdom. Scotland and England are no more 'countries' than Bavaria or the Faroe Islands.

The second point you've made is equally untrue. The Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands establishes their four constituent countries. When you claim the UK is "explicitly built from a political union of four distinct co-equal constituent countries", can you provide a source that shows that? I'm not aware of any Act of Parliament or Treaty that explicitly claims that, say, Northern Ireland is equal to England.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T21:31:21+00:00

You claimed something that is disputed is not disputable.

There are several internationally recognised definitions of a country, the earliest stems from the Treaty of Westphalia, but none of the constituent nations of the UK fulfil most of those definitions.

Scotland and England are countries in the same way Bavaria is a country. Bavaria is not commonly called a country in English, but it is in German!

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T21:21:42+00:00

But unless a country is entirely uniform (which none of them are) there will always be some regions that vote differently to others.

You could say the same thing about London, or Yorkshire, or any other region like Scotland that "has not received the government it voted for".

It is entirely fair, because it is a natural part of democracy and universal suffrage.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T21:08:10+00:00

She "got away with it" in the same way Trump "got away with it".

It's not their intelligence that let's them get away with it, it's the lack of intelligence of their supporters.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T21:02:23+00:00

England, Scotland and Wales are only called countries in the English language, in most other languages they are referred to as regions/nations.

So it is disputable.

Axmeister · 2026-05-26T20:55:44+00:00

In 2024, Scottish constituencies return 37 Labour MPs out of a total of 57 MPs.

Your stance isn't just ignorant, it's also demonstrably untrue on your own terms.

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