The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.

Because those are flying about all over the place.

First the ad company told us that SPT had pulled the ads in response to numerous complaints that they were “political”. Then SPT told the media that the ad company had pulled the ads itself after belatedly realising. Then the ad company said the same, lying that we’d claimed to be a charity (we hadn’t), and that we hadn’t told them we were a politics site (we had).

And now the story’s changing again. Newsnet Scotland reports today the results of an FOI request which reveals the ads were pulled not for being “political”, but because of bizarre and absurd allegations that this site (rather than the advert) is “openly racist, xenophobic, and transphobic”, as well as “thoroughly nasty” in general.

We challenge anyone to find a single sentence anywhere in the 2,329 articles we’ve published in the last two-and-a-half years that qualifies as “openly”, or indeed covertly, “racist”, “xenophobic” or “transphobic”. (Although those wouldn’t actually be “political” issues anyway, certainly not in the sense of SPT’s regulations.)

But there’s more. SPT expressly told several journalists (see links below) that they’d had “several” complaints about the ads. But when a Wings reader also sent them an FOI request, this is what they were told:

When required by law to tell the truth, SPT finally conceded that there had been exactly ONE complaint – presumably from our racism-alleging friend – and also that there had been a staggering 191 complaints about the ads being pulled.

We’d like to go on record thanking the complainant – doubtless one of our little crew of dedicated stalkers who regularly make the same baseless slurs – for their actions. The pulling of the ads generated vastly more publicity than the ads themselves could ever have dreamed of (with stories on the BBC, STV, Guardian, Press Gazette, Observer and elsewhere raising our profile far more widely and dramatically than a few cards on Glasgow’s underground), and as a bonus we even got all our money back.

But the fascinating aspect is the complete inability of the SPT to get its story straight, and the apparent belief that it could suppress the truth indefinitely when the company is subject to Freedom Of Information rules.

You’d think that by now the Labour establishment would finally have learned that independence supporters are a little more streetwise and savvy than that. But if you did, you wouldn’t be the first people to have grossly overestimated the intelligence of the party that still thinks Scotland is its own personal fiefdom.