Hello and joining us we have spike

podcast I'm Fraser Myers and with me in the studio this week we have Spikes editor

Tom Slater and joining us we have Spikonomist Luke Gitos.

Coming up on today's show the implosion of the SMP, the rise of legal activism and the madness of extinction rebellion.

So a lot of papers are reporting that Nicholas Sturgeon could be arrested at any moment.

Senior SMP party figures have said it could be inevitable even.

Tom, this would be an extraordinary development.

How did we get here?

Well, in a way we can only lay out the plain facts of the matter for reasons that we'll get on to.

But essentially this is a police investigation that has been going on in Scotland since 2021

into the question of the SMP's finances.

Particularly there is this quote unquote missing 600,000 pounds which was raised from

SMP members and supporters to fight another independence campaign and seemingly questions about what happened to that money,

is it for it accounted for and so on.

In the past week we've seen the arrest and the questioning of Colin B.T. was the

SMP's national treasurer for the best for more than 20 years in fact and that came after

Peter Murrell who was the chief executive of the SMP he was also he is also

also Nicholas urgent's husband of course simply being arrested neither of them were charged we should say.

But nevertheless we've created a situation where as many of the paper's reporters you say the only kind of senior

SMP official who was named on their accounts and so on who hasn't been arrested in its view by the police is Nicholas Surgeon.

Really striking scandal obviously has all kinds of potential political ramifications for the SMP and their new first minister.

But in a sense, when we're talking about the scandal itself, there's not much more than that that we can say because of the fact that's under contempt of court law which is particularly stringent in Scotland

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