Wings Over Scotland

Quite a few remarkable things were said on last night’s STV debate between the two prospective leaders of the Labour Party branch office in Scotland. This one, though, was especially striking.

That’s Anas Sarwar denying three times that he was a part of the “Better Together” campaign with the Tories. A startled Colin Mackay claims to have seen photographs of Sarwar campaigning with BT, at which point Sarwar insists no, he merely appeared on TV debates which happened to also have Tory guests.

It seemed like it’d be an easy thing to check.

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We’ve just had a response from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to our article of this morning. The Foundation has confirmed on the record, through its Twitter account, that the deputy leader of Labour in Scotland misrepresented its views on the BBC Radio 5 Live debate yesterday morning. Its reaction is below.

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NOTICE: It has come to our attention that an article on Wings Over Scotland last week contained a factual error. In the post “One man and his props”, we alleged that in addition to a fake government paper brandished by the deputy leader of the Labour Party in Scotland during a televised debate, a “real” one had also been produced.

We have subsequently discovered that in fact, both papers were entirely fake. We apologise unreservedly to Anas Sarwar for the implication that he was telling the truth. We ought to have known better.

We’ve already highlighted the absurdity of the comments made by several Unionist politicians last week (in both the Commons and the Lords) about the Scottish Parliament being “undemocratic” and a “one-man dictatorship”. But we only mentioned Scottish representation in doing so. What about the whole UK?

The majority – 53% – of votes cast by the British electorate in 2010 were worthless, because they were cast for candidates who didn’t win the seat they contested and are therefore simply thrown in the bin by the “first past the post” electoral system. Thousands of people were locked out of polling stations across the country on the evening of the vote, but it didn’t really matter, because statistically speaking their vote would probably have been completely ignored anyway.

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There was a shock admission from Anas Sarwar, “deputy” leader of Scottish Labour, when speaking about the referendum on BBC Scotland’s “The Big Debate” last night:

“This will be the biggest decision that any of you will make in your lifetime, and what we need actually is Yes.”

It’s not every day we agree with the often factually-challenged MP for Glasgow Central, but this time we think he’s hit the nail square on the head.

(Because it’s fine to just cut people’s quotes short to suit your own purposes, right?)

It’s not like we didn’t already know that, of course. But while Labour desperately distort and edit Alex Salmond’s words to try to justify an allegation of untruth, ably assisted by the Scottish media doing the same to Nicola Sturgeon by cutting her microphone when she attempted to answer questions on the subject, their Scottish leader – sorry, “deputy” leader – quietly gets on with doing what he does best: telling outright, unambiguous, empirical lies.

We’ll let the veteran Scottish journalist George Kerevan (a former Scotsman editor, Labour councillor and SNP candidate), who did all the hard work of digging out the stats, tell you all about it. But here’s a quote from the piece just for flavour.

“Following the publication of the latest official employment figures on 17 October, Anas Sarwar announced to the BBC: “In the last three months, 7,000 people in Scotland have lost their jobs while employment in the rest of the UK is going up – this SNP government has to start taking responsibility for that”.

Mr Sarwar is factually wrong.

The figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) do not say that 7,000 people “have lost their jobs” in the period June through August (i.e. the summer).

It is true that the figure for the total jobless rose by 7,000 to 222,000. But most of that 7,000 figure has nothing to do with people losing their jobs, as Mr Sarwar claims. Rather, it is due to young people joining the labour market from school of university, which is normal in the summer. And from people previously not looking for work returning to the labour market – usually a positive sign of returning economic confidence.

The ONS figures actually show that the fall in the number of jobs in the Scottish economy of the summer was only 1,000. Certainly that is going in the wrong direction. But it does not help policy analysis to misquote the true figures, or exaggerate actual job losses by a factor of seven.”

We look forward keenly to the media reporting Mr Sarwar’s lie, and grilling him on Newsnight Scotland about it while muting his replies.

We invite the de facto leader of Scottish Labour to sue us if the title of this article is libellous. But the facts seem to us to be clear and incontrovertible. On BBC1’s weekend political programme Sunday Politics Scotland on the 1st of April 2012, Anas Sarwar was interviewed by Isabel Fraser, along with the SNP’s Stewart Hosie.

Below is a transcript of part of the discussion, on the subject of Labour’s allegations that the Scottish Government’s consultation on the independence referendum was “designed for abuse”. It begins 43m 36s into the show, just after Fraser has suggested to Sarwar that the consultation process is in fact, as stated by Hosie, identical to those previously conducted by Labour.

SARWAR: It isn’t the same as previous processes, because you don’t even have to submit an email address or any form of identity to put in an anonymous response, and you can put in multiple anonymous responses… on the second point that Stewart raised around the Labour Party’s own website, you have to put in an email address and a name to be able to respond, so it’s not an anonymous response that you could put in from our own site.

FRASER: But you could put in multiple responses from that address.

SARWAR: No, you have to put in your own name and an email address, which, which you can’t use multiple…

FRASER: So you’re monitoring it, and you will ensure that?

SARWAR: Absolutely, there’s no multiple responses, they can see exactly who has put in a response with their name and also their email address.

Sarwar then repeats the allegation that the process was“not only open to abuse, it’s designed for abuse” by the SNP. Fraser puts it to Hosie that that’s a very significant accusation and asks him if he accepts the charge.

HOSIE: What’s more disturbing is Anas Sarwar there saying that the responses through the Labour Party website are being monitored. That clearly is very worrying indeed, if the Labour Party are able to monitor responses through their website to a public consultation. That’s extremely concerning indeed that you said that.

SARWAR: That’s not what I said, Stewart. What I said was –

HOSIE: You said they were being monitored.

SARWAR: – there are individual, individual email addresses and names –

HOSIE: You said they were being monitored.

SARWAR: – individual email addresses and names that would go in from our responses. The point I’m making, and this is clear – I am making that accusation that the SNP are looking like they’re trying to rig this referendum.

(We’ll ignore the cowardly weasel-worded smear “I am making the accusation that the SNP are looking like they’re trying to rig this referendum” for now.)

We’ll be clear: Sarwar’s statements in the transcript above are lies. That’s not a matter of our interpretation or opinion, but empirical fact. You do NOT “have to put in your own name” on Labour’s form. Wings Over Scotland has already proved this by submitting a consultation response through the form using Anas Sarwar’s name, along with the email address “anas.sarwar@scottishlabour.org.uk”. We are not Anas Sarwar.

Sarwar’s repeated claim that “no multiple responses” are possible through the form is also a lie – there are no discernible safeguards against either fake names or multiple responses on the site, as we also verified by successfully submitting further multiple entries through the same form, including this one in which we used the name “anonymous” and the email address “anonymous@anonymous.com”.

Sarwar’s position on whether Labour are monitoring the responses in order to potentially catch these abuses is doubly untruthful. When Fraser asks him “So you’re monitoring [the responses via the form]?”, he answers “Absolutely” (although our experiments suggest this is not the case), yet mere seconds later when Hosie expresses concern about this admission, he replies “That’s not what I said”, even though it was, as an indisputable matter of record, precisely what he said.

The Scottish media, it probably goes without saying, has not challenged Sarwar on these easily-demonstrable lies. As Sarwar was nominated by Scottish Labour to be its spokesman for the issue on Sunday Politics Scotland, we believe it’s reasonable to assume, furthermore, that his responses were not made out of simple ignorance.

Should Mr Sarwar contact us to explain that in fact it was the case that he simply had no idea what he was talking about, we will gladly withdraw our allegations and issue an apology to that effect. But in the absence of any such statement, the evidence makes it impossible for us to reach any other conclusion than that he deliberately and knowingly lied to Isabel Fraser, Stewart Hosie and the Scottish people.

We do not believe such a person is fit for office in one of the nation’s biggest political parties, or indeed to be a Member of Parliament. We think most people would agree, and we call on Anas Sarwar to resign both positions immediately.

It’s Wings’ 14th birthday today, and to be entirely honest with you, readers, like a lot of teenagers we’re having a bit of an existential crisis. It’s quite difficult to see any point in being a Scottish political journalist for the next five years, because it’s just going to be one depressing Groundhog Day after another.

So rather than moan on as usual, today we’re handing over to a precocious new talent whose enthusiasm can’t be dimmed. It’s one that garnered a lot of attention this week by delivering a comprehensive and very entertaining spanking to SNP MP and devoted friend of the site Pete “Cosy Feet” Wishart. 

Wishart threw such a petulant strop that he accused a code algorithm of defamation and threatened legal action against the inanimate collection of 1s and 0s.

With skills like that already placing it well beyond the abilities of most of the Scottish political commentariat, we thought we’d give it a tryout and ask it to take a look into the country’s future.

The following article is completely unedited other than a bit of formatting, though we did ask it (with only partial success) to tone down the haggis-and-bagpipes stuff slightly from its first draft. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Grok. Unlike most journos, it provided links and it did write its own headline.

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This really is an extraordinary headline, for multiple reasons.

Because what actually IS “the rise of Reform”?

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So on the surface level this is just flat-out hilarious.

Firstly because, as we showed you yesterday, the “significant proportion of Scotland’s population” which appears to have been won back to the SNP since John Swinney became its leader is… 1%.

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I spent yesterday trying to work out exactly why I was so depressed about the fatal shooting of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk.

It wasn’t because I shared many of his opinions – other than opposition to gender ideology and DEI, and (surprisingly) support for Scottish independence, we had little in common. And it wasn’t general sadness about such a young man (31), a husband and a father to two preschool children, being so brutally slain. Because over 50 people are murdered every single day in the US alone and everyone just shrugs.

Nor was it even the fact that his death was captured in all its shocking, bloody horror on video, and inescapable on social media, nor that it came just the day after footage broke of another appalling killing in the States, the unprovoked stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic who’d been released on no-fee bail despite 14 previous arrests and should never have been at large.

Nor was it the grimly predictable emergence of the fact that Kirk’s shooter appears to have been a transactivist – America’s fastest-growing murderer demographic.

In the end, the most chilling thing about this particular crime is this: Charlie Kirk was killed for doing exactly what civilised people are supposed to do.

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Scotland’s two main political parties have published their 2024 accounts. The SNP’s can be found here, and Scottish Labour’s here. Neither tells a massively inspiring tale.

(Click pics to enlarge.)

The SNP lost £445,000 despite being boosted by donations totalling almost £940,000 from just FOUR individuals. Scottish Labour made a profit of £350,000 but only because it was bailed out to the tune of £777,000 by the UK party, otherwise it would have made a very similar loss to the SNP’s (specifically £428,000).

Neither of those things are surprising, since 2024 was a UK general election year and those are when parties spend big. But the devil, as always, is in the details.

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