There’s something different about one of these pictures of all the big-name speakers at the Scottish Labour conference, but we can’t quite seem to put our finger on it.
Can you help, readers?
We have a fun task for Scottish Labour’s exciting new “Truth Team”, which made its debut last week. Clearly it would be rather unseemly to go around proclaiming yourself an arbiter of truth if there was a great big lie at the heart of your very existence, so hopefully someone on the Team will be able to explain the curious and seemingly untrue assertion that still heads up Scottish Labour’s own Twitter account.
We highlighted it yesterday for fun, but it’s worth serious examination too.
In a shock development surprising absolutely nobody on Earth, the Sunday Times today reports that “Scottish Labour plans to hand the Scottish parliament full control over income tax are expected to be shelved after a backlash from some of the party’s most senior figures.”
The writing’s been on the wall for Johann Lamont’s policy brainwave all weekend, as Labour MPs and MSPs – even those who were actually members of the devolution commission which came up with the proposal – queued up on TV to conspicuously NOT give their backing to the idea of devolving control of income tax to Holyrood. You can see the rest of the Times piece below.
Here’s Edinburgh MP Alistair Darling telling the Scottish Labour conference (around 1h 19m 40s) that in addition to an independent Scotland not being able to use the Euro or Sterling, it wouldn’t be able to have its own currency either.
“Every time your granny or your uncle or your auntie came up here they’d have to get currency in order to come and visit you.”
Now, we know the former Chancellor is careful with his pennies (if not so much with ours), but when our relatives come to see us, we don’t charge for bed and breakfast.
A few days ago, our mole in Scottish Labour HQ sent us the first draft of Johann Lamont’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference. Oddly, a few lines seem to have gone missing from the version delivered to the hall yesterday afternoon.
Here’s the full original text, so you can see what Johann was really trying to say.
We gather a few refreshments are usually taken at party conferences, so given that Eddie Barnes of the Scotsman is in Inverness covering the Scottish Labour gathering, perhaps a hangover explains his rather confused piece for Scotland on Sunday today.
There are three particularly notable passages, which we’ll take you through quickly here so you don’t have to go and read them on the paper’s website.
We very much doubt we’ll ever tire of picture galleries of happy party-conference faces, and we know you like them too. So here’s a spirit-lifting selection from this weekend’s joyful gathering of Scottish Labour in Inverness.
Caption suggestions in the comments as usual, please.
Scottish Labour’s record time for a policy U-turn was already pretty low. It took less than 24 hours from Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech before her MSPs were hastily popping up in the papers to insist that various universal services were in fact NOT under threat at all. (Despite the fact that the head of the commission investigating them had explicitly said that nothing was off the table.)
But yesterday saw the hapless party set a new personal best.
We’re not impartial witnesses, of course, but we suspect even the most unbiased observer would struggle to dispute that the last 12 hours have seen Scottish Labour’s most spectacular on-air implosion since Iain Gray’s infamous Hindenberg disaster in the wake of Wendy Alexander’s “bring it on” brainfail of 2008.
For openers, a pained and ghostly-looking Johann Lamont on Scotland Tonight. (Starts at 0:51, continues for about six toe-curling, slow-motion minutes. Audio-only recording here for when the video is no longer available on the STV website.)
Then some desperate stalling from Anas Sarwar on Newsnight Scotland. (We’ve linked to a bit four minutes in, which lasts until the end about eight minutes later.)
But the glorious piece de resistance is unquestionably Johann Lamont being speared, skinned and filletted by David Miller on Good Morning Scotland. (The first two minutes or so are a bit slow, but you really need to hear all of the 10 minutes following them.)
And if you don’t have the time to watch/listen to the whole 24 minutes of those right now, here’s all three appearances compressed into just nine seconds.
To be honest, further commentary from us seems superfluous.
The Scotsman reports this morning that Ed Miliband is planning a highly personal attack on Alex Salmond and the SNP at the Scottish Labour conference in Inverness later today. Apparently the Labour leader will say, among other things:
“His is a narrow nationalism that thinks the way Scotland prospers is in a race to the bottom across the UK, cutting corporation tax rates for powerful companies while doing nothing for working people. And a narrow nationalism that says if it is in the interest of the SNP then it is OK to do cosy deals with Rupert Murdoch.”
If you can’t quite remember who Ed Miliband is, this is him:
We look forward to that exclusive.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
