Kate Devlin of the Herald has been a political journalist as long as we can remember.
So it’s quite surprising that she’s apparently never heard of Gordon Brown before.
With a knife-edge general election just 90-odd days away, we must confess ourselves surprised at the sudden rash of candour/indiscipline (depending on how generously you want to frame it) that’s broken out in Scottish Labour.
It started soon after the referendum, when Edinburgh Labour chairman Trevor Davies felt confident enough, with the vote won, to announce on an officially-backed Labour website that his primary loyalty was to his party rather than to the people of Scotland, under the startlingly blunt headline “Labour first, Scottish second”.
But any notion that the comments represented nothing more than a vainglorious and momentary slip from a loose cannon were soon dispelled.
Let’s start with the obvious: nobody has a clue who’s going to win the 2015 general election. But almost without exception, commentators are saying that should Labour’s vote collapse in Scotland to the extent that current polling says it will, it will radically alter Ed Miliband’s chances of kicking David Cameron out of 10 Downing Street.
That’s a message that Labour are delighted to hear, because their entire Scottish electoral strategy/manifesto is the phrase “If you vote SNP the Tories will get back in”. Now, we already know that on the empirical level that’s complete cobblers – the Tories historically get in when the SNP vote is lowest.
But it could be fairly argued that those statistics are correlation rather than causation, isolated as they are from the rest of the UK’s results. So we decided to take a more detailed look at some of the possible scenarios from this May’s vote and see if the Nats really could let the Tories in.
Ed Balls today gave an interview to Sky News in which the would-be Chancellor appeared to explicitly rule out a Labour/SNP coalition for the first time, maintaining that the party is only interested in a majority. Yet the more strenuously Labour insist on a majority, the further from their grasp it slips.
Just over a year ago we ran an article suggesting that the opinion polls masked a much stronger position for the Conservatives than they seemed to show. We noted that when the election came round, it was likely that when UKIP supporters faced the reality of First Past The Post in seats where they had no sensible hope of winning, a significant proportion of them would reluctantly vote Tory instead to secure the EU referendum that is their defining goal.
Now we have some numbers on that.
The kerfuffle on social media right now over some votes on fracking in the House of Commons tonight would probably dislodge a fair amount of gas trapped in rock by itself. Claim and counter-claim are zinging around furiously, but we eventually found a factual précis that even idiots like us could understand. Buckle up.
It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.
Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.
But readers might be wise to be sceptical.
We don’t get paid enough. Then again, we’re not sure how much money it would have taken to make the job of wading through the UK government’s 134-page “command paper” on Scottish devolution bearable. There may not BE that much money.
The entire document is a heroic achievement in the field of wonkspeak, screed after screed of impenetrable jargon deployed to create something which could in fact be accurately and fully summed up in six words: “Oh, we’ll figure something out later”.
Here’s a (very) typical passage:
We haven’t left out a subsequent paragraph explaining the answer. The paper simply leaves this and pretty much every other question hanging in the air, to be filled in at some unspecified future date after the general election, by whichever party is in government, if they can be bothered.
Don’t all celebrate at once.
We’ve spoken before of Scottish Labour’s most revered ancient totem of faith, the 1979 “stab in the back” myth by which they accuse the SNP of sole responsibility for the 18-year rule of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.
More than three-and-a-half decades later, Labour still cling to it as their trump card in any argument against the SNP, pulling it out when all else fails and relying on the fact that hardly anyone was there to contradict their version of events.
It’s an accusation that’s complete cobblers from top to bottom, but then again you’d expect us to say that. So instead let’s get the view of someone who was there.
We’re exhausted this morning, readers, and it’s not from a lack of sleep. It’s because we’ve been trying to definitively establish what Scottish Labour’s position with regard to the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system is, on the day the entire UK-wide Labour party (with so far one known honourable exception in the form of Katy Clark MP) looks set to boycott a Westminster debate on it, and it’s a time-consuming and tiring job.
In fairness, we can’t really say that we blame the Scottish branch office, especially, for ducking out, because we suspect they haven’t got any more of a clue what their position is than we do, and if you’ve got to stand up in your country’s Parliamentary chamber – which of course for them is the House Of Commons – and make a speech about it, that’s a significant handicap.
Last week the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine – a figure often singled out for criticism by both Unionist parties and the media – came under fire once more for a column she’d written in the Daily Record, in which she questioned the motivations behind Labour’s desire to devolve more power away from the Scottish Parliament to local councils.
It’s a point this site was making as far back as 2012. Scottish Labour have given up on any hope of winning a Holyrood election in the forseeable future – the latest poll of Scottish Parliament voting intentions puts the SNP on over 50%, to Labour’s 26% – so the party has suddenly discovered a passion for local devolution that it oddly chose not to enact while it was in control at Holyrood for the best part of a decade.
But McAlpine’s point that Scots tend to trust the Scottish Parliament more than any other elected body was immediately misrepresented as an attack on hard-working and honest councillors. Yet the reality is that there’s an empirical measure of democratic accountability (and therefore trust), and it’s a measure in which Holyrood unarguably comes out on top.
So far in our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK we’ve found that while there can be very sizeable gaps between Scottish public opinion and that elsewhere, it mostly tends to be within the same side of the debate – for example, rUK citizens are much keener on retaining the monarchy and nuclear weapons than Scots are, but Scots do still favour both.
Our final round-up off the poll findings, though, focuses on the three questions we asked where the differences DID cross the divide.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
