Wings Over Scotland

We’ve got nothing today, readers. We don’t want to turn into Wings Over Jim Murphy, but otherwise the Scottish political scene is a bit tumbleweedy. Tell us something interesting that we should be covering. Or just a fun fact, or a joke, or anything.

In the light of the absolute horror at Charlie Hebdo today, it’s either that or we’re going to start running cartoons of Mohammed on principle.

It’s always tricky coming back to the office after the holidays. You get a bit ring-rusty and it can take a few days before you’re firing on all cylinders again.

So we’re going to be charitable and assume that lack of match fitness was the cause of Scottish Labour’s astonishing multi-track trainwreck yesterday.

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From today’s Telegraph:

Actual number of children belonging to Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell: 0.

You literally can’t make this stuff up.

We had to extend our festive semi-break for a day to deal with some administrative matters, readers, but it’s just as well, because the thing that happened today would have defied our best attempts at either analysis or satire.

That’s a real thing we didn’t make up. Saints preserve us.

Labour 2014:

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There’s a new hot topic among the Westminster commentariat.

Because desperate times call for desperate measures.

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If twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then these five recent pictures of “Saint” Jim Murphy – the martyr who endured an egging for all our sins – from the print media surely tell us something interesting.

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We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.

Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.

That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.

And that matters more than you think it does.

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Wings readership stats for 2014:

Could have done worse.

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Scottish Labour clearly get a pretty good deal from the printers’ shop that makes the giant pound coins, because they’re waving them around again.

The North British branch office’s latest wizard jape is to upset all the people who they urged to join for £5 just last month – never mind the gullible saps forking out nine times that much – by offering cut-price memberships at £1 a year.

It’s what the retail trade calls a “loss leader” – in effect the party will be paying people to join, because £1 won’t come anywhere near to covering the cost of processing each new member, sending them a membership card and so on.

But it did give us an idea.

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The chief opponents of UK electoral reform are the Labour and Conservative parties, who by an astonishing coincidence are also the two parties who benefit by far the most from the undemocratic stitch-up that is First Past The Post, by which more than half of the votes cast in Britain result in no Parliamentary representation whatsoever.

The excuse they normally use to justify a system by which one of them will usually get a large absolute majority on barely over one-third of the votes cast is that FPTP produces “strong” governments, where “strong” is defined to mean “no possibility of the opposition, which speaks for two-thirds of the population, ever defeating the ruling party in a vote”.

The AV referendum was taken as a ringing endorsement of this principle, although in practice it offered just a bafflingly complicated and even less attractive version of the status quo. But a remarkable poll in Scotland this weekend (with detail published in today’s The National) shows that on one side of the border at least, FPTP has completely lost the support of the electorate.

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Several papers lead this morning with a Panelbase poll showing that a sizeable majority of Scots – regardless of their party allegiances – think that electing a large number of SNP MPs at next May’s UK general election will be the only practical way to safeguard Scotland’s interests in the wake of the referendum No vote.

This poll, currently live on the YouGov website, shows why:

The problem that will arise if most Scottish Labour MPs keep their seats in 2015 will be that there is only one Labour Party and it has only one leader.

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