By Mark E. Saunders of “The Scottish Minuteman” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61575625542197

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Reports in today’s Sunday newspapers are suggesting that Gordon Brown was taking a “very keen interest” in Operation Branchform.

Apparently he raised the investigation into SNP finances with his friend, the then Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Sir Iain Livingstone, several times.

And before anyone says — “so what? It’s just another resurrection of Auld Broon” — remember what Branchform became.

It wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill police investigation. It became one of the biggest political stories in Scotland, engulfing the SNP leadership and doing enormous damage to all of us in the independence movement.

Brown isn’t just some has-been politician or random member of the public. Whether we like it or not, he still has some considerable clout with undecided voters on the constitutional question. And he was one of the biggest and most influential figures in the Better Together campaign.

So here’s the bit that should interest us.

A leading figure in the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK is taking a very keen interest in a live investigation into the SNP — a political organisation diametrically opposed to his own archaic ideology — and discussing it with the Chief Constable of Scotland.

There’s no evidence that Brown told Police Scotland what to do. Police Scotland denies political interference.

But let’s reverse it.

Imagine Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf or John Swinney was found to have privately raised a live police investigation into a senior Unionist figure with the Chief Constable of Scotland.

Would the usual suspects from the Scottish media and political arena have shrugged and said, “Nothing to see here. He was only taking a keen interest”?

I very much doubt it.

And that’s why this particular story matters to independence supporters.

It may not prove a conspiracy. But it does raise questions about the political process, access to it, relationships and influence within it.

We’ve been told for years to trust the process.

Maybe we should also be asking who was and is lurking in the shadows of the process, who had and has access and to whom.

But more importantly, whether the same standards apply when the political circumstances are reversed.

Because perhaps the real question isn’t who is persuading us how to vote.

Perhaps it’s how many times Scotland has been ‘persuaded’ to vote against its own best interests without ever questioning the methods and connections of those doing the persuading?

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