Wings Over Scotland

Careful now.

(Polls here.)

…of a story in the Scottish Sun today is something rather important.

Those are the words of David Cameron as he launched the Scottish Tories’ manifesto in front of a heavily-vetted invited audience in Glasgow yesterday. They make the pages of a couple of other papers, including the Guardian (which hides them even further down the page than the Sun does), but it’s only the Herald that picks up on their significance, leading its article with the unequivocal lines:

“David Cameron has emphatically ruled out a deal with the SNP to deliver the Nationalists’ demand for full fiscal autonomy.”

And that’s weird, because it’s actually pretty big news.

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Last night’s juxtaposition of somewhat contradictory front covers on the Herald and Scottish Daily Mail was modestly amusing, but nothing new. We pointed out weeks ago that papers on both the left and the right were – often on the same days – painting the SNP as hand-in-glove allies of either Labour or the Tories according to whatever suited their own agendas, and nothing’s changed in that respect.

But it’s interesting to take a look behind the headlines of the respective stories and see the degree to which the truth can be bent, exaggerated or in some cases simply made up from thin air.

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Sorry about this, readers. We know that YOU already know that the biggest party in a hung parliament has no special privileges when it comes to forming the government, but since those truth-dodging scamps Scottish Labour still won’t stop saying it (see below), we do still need to keep collating the evidence proving it’s a lie.

The bald-eagle-looking chap toting the cerise tie in this clip of this morning’s Victoria Derbyshire show on the BBC News channel is Lord (Andrew) Adonis, a former Labour government minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He also wrote the book “Five Days In May” about the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, despite having won almost 50 fewer seats than the Conservatives in that election. So he understands the process.

Lord Adonis does, in fairness, make a brief and half-hearted attempt at punting Jim Murphy’s “1924” line, but in the end he’s forced to concede (nudged along by Peter Riddell of the Institute for Government) that in fact the second-placed party forming the government is perfectly possible.

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The Daily Record gets up high on its outrage horse this morning with a front-page story titled “Double-crossed on devo”, echoing Jim Murphy’s claim of yesterday that the Tories’ manifesto pledge on “English votes for English laws” is a “betrayal” of the “Vow” signed by the three UK party leaders before the independence referendum.

Unsurprisingly, the Record gives rather less prominence to the news that the Vow isn’t worth the fake parchment it wasn’t written on than it did to repeatedly hyping it up and then proclaiming that it had already been delivered.

But there’s a twist.

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Last week we listened to a Radio Scotland phone-in debate on Trident, hosted very deftly by John Beattie, who managed to steer callers away from political points and keep the discussion on the merits or otherwise of the weapons system itself.

Sadly that didn’t dissuade the usual coterie of nutters/local councillors phoning in insisting that (a) North Korea would invade/blast Scotland off the face of the Earth the moment we let our guard down, and (b) Helensburgh would immediately revert to the Stone Age at the loss of jobs were the few hundred Trident sailors who spend about a week every year in the town to be reassigned to other posts in the navy.

We didn’t have time to ring in ourselves, but we did manage to think of a much better idea that solved both of those problems without lumbering Scotland with a gigantic nuclear white elephant, and one that would also free up an awful lot of valuable police time and resources that are currently spent arresting a bunch of hippies.

See if you can pick any holes in it, readers.

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We’ve been quiet today because we’ve been wading through the 80-odd painfully-dry pages of the Labour 2015 election manifesto, folks. It’s a deeply tedious read – screeds and screeds of waffly text about how nice things are nice and good things are good but bad things are bad. A couple of things did jump out, though. Here’s one.

Alert readers will of course recall that the party’s solemn pledge in Scotland is to provide 1000 more nurses (hastily revised from the comical “1000 more than whatever the SNP say”) from the proceeds of the Mansion Tax, even though NHS Scotland is devolved and no Westminster government can in fact hire a single Scottish nurse.

But hang on. Something’s not right about those numbers.

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A super-alert reader pointed out something about today’s Sunday Politics that we hadn’t noticed. Before the galaxy-class trainwreck that was the Scottish leaders’ debate, the networked section of the show had a piece on Scottish polling, and our eagle-eyed viewer spotted that the chart of projected seats wasn’t in proportion.

So we measured, and this is what it should have looked like.

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With the “biggest party forms the government” lie now sunk and rusting slowly on the seabed (weighed down even further by polls suggesting that Labour actually will be the largest party even if they lose all of Scotland to the SNP), and four weeks of campaigning left to fill, Scottish Labour have had to grab a hammer, smash the glass on the “EMERGENCY – IN CASE OF DESPERATION” box and clutch desperately at whatever they found inside.

The abject answer is “Project Fear 2 – This Time It’s Full Fiscal Autonomy”.

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Alert readers will probably recall that a couple of days ago we explained this site’s most fundamental purpose as being to teach people “how to read between the lines [and] and spot what isn’t being said” in newspapers, so we’re grateful to today’s Daily Record for providing us with a timely example of the second phenomenon.

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…we shall say zees only wance.

That clip (from just past midnight on the BBC News channel) isn’t a bad starting-point summary of last night’s extraordinary story, except by our count the Telegraph’s piece was fourth-hand rather than third-hand.

(First-hand would have been Nicola Sturgeon. Second-hand would have been the ambassador. Third-hand would have been the consul-general. The civil servant – who doubted the story him/herself – is fourth-hand.)

This is also a pretty good primer. Now let’s get to the fun stuff.

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In over 20 years of living in Bath, spanning five general elections, we’ve never seen a political billboard in town before. There’s been no point. In vote-share terms the city is the 4th-safest Lib Dem seat in the UK (and the 2nd-safest in England), and it has been since the party won it from the Conservatives in 1992.

But we’ve got a billboard now, featuring two men whose parties haven’t got an earthly hope of winning here (one of them because it’s not standing). What’s that all about?

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