Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour’s 2019 conference, which starts in Dundee tomorrow, isn’t taking place in the most auspicious of circumstances, to put it kindly. The branch office is trailing a breathtaking 22 points behind the SNP in the latest Holyrood polling, 8 points behind the Tories, and the gap is getting bigger.

Westminster polling isn’t a great deal better, with the SNP 15 points ahead despite having been in power for 12 years and doggedly attempting to commit electoral suicide with a raft of increasingly unpopular policies (more on that to come).

Donations have shrivelled to under £36,000 in the last year. (For perspective, the 2018 Wings fundraiser made over £153,000.) The North Britain branch has shed a fifth of its membership in a matter of months, has had to give away conference passes for free to try to fill seats, and is embroiled in a bitter spat over its EU policy.

So it’d be a tough time to be Richard Leonard, if anyone knew who that was.

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While we dig deep into the results of our latest Panelbase poll, we thought we should update you on the progress of this story from last month.

A few days ago we received a reply from the Information Commissioner’s Office, and as a result have sent a letter to the Conservative Party’s compliance department. You can read it below.

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We’ve just got the tables from a new Panelbase poll back, and they make grim reading for Labour (North British Branch Office) on the eve of their conference.

Holyrood voting intentions (constituency):

SNP 41% (nc)
Con 27% (+2)
Lab 19% (-4)
LD 8% (+2)
Grn 3% (nc)
UKIP 2% (+1)

(1002 Scottish voters, 2-6 March 2019)
Changes from December 2018

That’s getting perilously close to the all-time low of 14% achieved around the tail end of Kezia Dugdale’s disastrous leadership. And the list vote isn’t much better.

Holyrood voting intentions (region):

SNP 36% (-2)
Con 26% (nc)
Lab 19% (-3)
LD 9% (+2)
Grn 6% (nc)
UKIP 3% (+2)

But even with astonishing leads of 14% and 10% after 12 years in power, the SNP have nothing to be complacent about either – according to the Weber Shandwick seat projector, these numbers would give Nicola Sturgeon’s party 57 seats and the Greens just 4, meaning Holyrood’s pro-independence majority would be a goner and the Nats would need backing from at least one Unionist party to pass any bills, meaning no new mandate for an indyref.

Like everywhere else, Scotland is currently split down the middle and nobody knows which side of the tightrope it’ll fall off in the event of a push.

(Full series here.)

Self-propelling brain vacancy Alex Cole-Hamilton might have just recorded the shortest ever reign at the top of our Thickest Politician In Scotland rankings, but you can’t keep a proper idiot down for long.

It probably goes without saying that none of the above is even a little bit true.

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Lordy, is it that time again already?

Let’s leave aside the most toweringly and obviously cretinous aspect of that insanely illogical claim for a moment – namely, if the McCrone Report was such a smoking gun proving independence would be bad, why did the UK government suppress it for 30 years rather than sending a copy to every home in Scotland and shouting it from the rooftops every single day? – and just quickly look at what it actually said.

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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In today’s Times:

Yeah, you read it right. He really said it out loud.

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Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.

Unionists have been in a purple frenzy of rage in the last couple of weeks that the First Minister has dared to leave the country not once but twice in order to try to improve relations and trade links with Scotland’s business partners. Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton – a man who still thinks the Queensferry Crossing isn’t finished a year and a half after traffic started using it – tried a different tack.

And that’s a zinger of a point unless oh dear what’s this?

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It’s never a good look for a politician to have fewer principles than UKIP. When Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to Nigel Farage’s party, both stood down from their seats and fought by-elections to establish whether their electoral mandates were personal or owed to the party. Both of them won. (Though both men subsequently lost at general elections and Reckless has now returned to the Tories.)

The seven Labour MPs who resigned from the party today have no such honour and no such respect for the electorate. They’ve quit the party but not their cushy and lucrative jobs as opposition MPs, and will bring about absolutely no practical difference other than sitting a few feet further to the left in the Commons voting exactly the same way as they did before.

Labour MPs already regularly rebel against the whip anyway – just last week 40 of them broke ranks to back an SNP amendment on Brexit. So nothing will be achieved by Chuka Umunna and six people nobody in the real world has ever heard of splitting under the meaningless umbrella name “The Independent Group”, whose claim that “politics is broken” was neatly illustrated by its website at their big launch moment.

The seven claim that Labour values no longer represent them, yet they’re happy to remain in the seats that Labour’s manifesto and brand secured for them. Nor do they wish to stay in the party and fight for the values they think it should have. They’ve chosen the most cowardly, meaningless form of protest possible: keep cashing the paycheques but carp from the sidelines.

There are already three MPs elected as Labour but who now sit as nominal “independents” – Frank Field, John Woodcock and Ivan Lewis – and the fact that most people’s reaction to that fact will be “Who?” tells you all you need to know about the impact and power of not-actually-resigning “resignations”. Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction will be a shrug. Oh no, fewer Blairites in his party. Not the briar patch, Brer Fox!

And Theresa May? Theresa May won’t even notice. Why would she? TIG poses no kind of threat to her. The idea that any MPs from other parties are going to change their vote on anything just because there’s a new gang of would-be cool kids in the cafeteria who’ve given themselves a name is laughable in its tin-eared arrogance.

Indeed, mention of Brexit – the only political issue anyone in most of the UK cares about right now – was startlingly conspicuous by its near-total absence from the group’s press conference. Instead there was an almost endless parade of petty personal gripes and grievances in which the Labour Party was decried as a shambolic, racist, anti-Semitic entity posing a mortal threat to the nation’s politics – yet not one bad enough to actually take a stand against at the ballot box.

The 400-odd words we’ve written here already indulge the TIG “rebels” with far more attention and significance than their empty, craven gesture merits. So we won’t waste your time and ours with any more.