Galloway: The Hamilton Report is a joke, but what else should we have expected to emerge from the SNP's swampy Holyrood fiefdom?

75 redactions (by the client) in a 51-page report by a repeat hire like James Hamilton SC, does not an Independent Inquiry make. The Scottish government crow but they are not out of the woods yet.

The injustice against Alex Salmond has been compounded by the bizarre finale to the latest SNP-led Scottish Parliament, which has just broken up for the elections on May 6. The year-long enquiry by their OWN committee which found that the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon DID mislead the Scottish Parliament might as well have never happened 

In fact, a full-scale offensive was immediately launched against the Committee which had been hand-picked by the government, chaired by them and stuffed with ex-ministers sacked by Alex Salmond when he was first minister, yet still they found against Sturgeon.

So virulent has the abuse become that, last night, during a Scotsman newspaper televised hustings, a candidate from the Green Party – effectively the Gardening Section of the SNP – demanded the resignations from Parliament of the majority of the committee and their banning from the candidates list for the forthcoming polls! 

Mind you, they got off lightly. Today, a 63 year-old man appeared in court charged with threatening to shoot me, and the Scottish Conservative leader Rt Hon Douglas Ross, MP, through the head. 

Such is the toxic state of Scottish politics not a single ranking SNP figure has condemned, publicly or privately, this open threat of terrorist violence.

Scotland has become a failed state, lawless, truthless, drifting towards chaos. 

“If you come for the King, you'd better not miss,” is an old adage. When the SNP came for Alex Salmond they did miss, thanks to the good sense of the jury in the trial of the former first minister. Coincidentally, trial by jury is something the SNP are constantly threatening to do away with, most recently in relation to sexual crimes; make of that what you will. 

The majority women jury, under a female presiding judge, acquitted Salmond on ALL 13 charges. 

Nothing will ever be the same again. How could it? 

The electoral system here will ensure that neither the Tories nor Labour can form a majority government after May, so they will need to form a coalition government, because Scotland badly needs a time-out before somebody gets hurt. 

A National Unity government to steady the ship which is now rocking violently, is the only way to repair the wounds in Scottish society, and between Scotland and the rest of Britain. 

The Hamilton report was even denounced by, er, Hamilton himself, who said that the sheer amount of redactions carried the danger of “misleading the public.” Well, quite. Leaving aside how an “independent report” CAN be redacted (no legal mind as fine as his would dream of putting anything unlawfully into the public domain) by the government which set it up, what does the report actually say? 

Well, most importantly it said that “it was up to the Scottish Parliament to decide whether or not it was misled.” But they have already so decided, through the committee they set up to inquire into just that issue. The committee of now non-persons who would be airbrushed from Scottish history, if the SNP were to have their way. 

Full disclosure: Alex Salmond is a friend of mine and also now a colleague. I sat with him for decades in the House of Commons, disagreeing fundamentally about Scottish Independence, but in mutual respect. No-one can thole the injustice that was visited upon him except the unhinged who've overdosed on the Braveheart mythology, made by an Australian about events 700 years ago in a war between two French-speaking kings with Scots fighting on either side. 

Alex Salmond hasn't spoken his last words on these matters yet, but when he does it will be to devastating effect, and in court. He is suing the Permanent Secretary of the Scottish Government for the now admitted disastrous way in which the Alex Salmond-Nicola Sturgeon affair was handled and has also submitted a police complaint seeking the identity and prosecution of the official who leaked the whole story in the first place to the Scottish Daily Record. As even the dogs in the street know the identity of the leaker, that should be the shortest investigation in history! 

So hubble, bubble, toil and trouble, then, for the three women at the top of Scottish Politics – Nicola Sturgeon, Leslie Evans and Liz Lloyd. Salmond isn't finished yet. This is not the beginning of the end, but rather just the end of the beginning.

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