I wrote a piece recently on the internal wrangling last year in the
pro-independence Business for Scotland, based on a tranche of leaked
board-level emails.
Much of the content centred on the role of BfS “managing director”
Michelle Thomson - yes, her - who was allowed to keep the title after having her
consultancy payments axed.
The row played into a wider split between, on the one side, board members Thomson and
Ivan McKee (who is now an SNP Holyrood candidate), and BfS chief executive
Gordon Macintyre-Kemp.
The emails also appeared to confirm widely held suspicions about "close" links between BfS and the SNP.
In an email to senior BfS figures on March 30th last year, ex-chair
Tony Banks threw SNP chief executive Peter Murrell’s name (PM) into the mix:
“There have been remarks made by PM regarding having the
both of you [Kemp and Thomson] and the fact both of you should have been fund raising over the
last few months! He does not think that we need both of you.”
This is interesting because the Electoral Commission had
strict rules in place about separate campaign groups “working together” during
the referendum. The email has now triggered a complaint to the Commission.
However, other emails reveal there was a board split about
the closeness of BfS to Yes Scotland, which was the official pro-independence
campaign group.
McKee was of the view that, to comply with Commission rules,
Yes Scotland Head of Development Colin Pyle had to be excluded from BfS board
meetings.
In an email to board members on May 13th, he
wrote: “Frankly struggling to see how someone in the payroll of Yes Scotland
coming to a BfS meeting can be classed as anything other than ‘working together’.”
Others disagreed, but McKee persisted: “The biggest risk to
the organisation is for us to realise that there are serious non-compliance
risks and to ignore those. There is no bigger gift to the No campaign than that.”
It is unclear how the Pyle issue was resolved. Perhaps it is
something for further enquiry.
