Wings Over Scotland

It’s been impossible to know where to start today. Last night hundreds of angry protestors picketed a £200-a-seat banquet in Glasgow at which Scottish Labour “showcase[d] the party in front of donors and business figures” in a desperate bid to raise cash for the branch office (which survives on handouts from the UK party), and at which deputy leader Anas Sarwar, less than 48 hours after vowing he’d remain in his position, announced that he’d step down after all.

Despite being the deputy, Sarwar wasn’t stepping down to contest the leadership, but rather to smooth the path of Jim Murphy. Murphy is London’s preferred candidate, but even Labour aren’t dim enough to want to run Holyrood with London-based MPs in BOTH of the leadership roles, so Sarwar pulled a swift U-turn to offer a potential “dream ticket” of Murphy and Kezia Dugdale, a Lothians list MSP who this week told the Edinburgh Evening News that she intends to leave politics within 10 years.

(Then again, in 2011 Jim Murphy told Labour List he wouldn’t consider running for Scottish leader for “maybe 20 years” and he’s only waited three, so who knows?)

But there’s so much more going on.

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Here’s a picture of Jim Murphy campaigning for a No vote a few weeks ago.

Except it isn’t, is it?

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We have many faults, but we try our hardest to ensure that hypocrisy isn’t one of them, so we’re not about to turn round and pay tribute to Johann Lamont just because she’s quit her job. We’re sure she’s a nice person in real life, but for three years the Scottish Labour “leader” has lived a lie, railing bitterly against London control while doing everything she could to impose that very fate on the people of Scotland.

(And ultimately succeeding, in so far as one could say that the mainly-absent Lamont could claim to have played any meaningful part in the referendum campaign.)

She leaves her party in the same abject state she found it, its position in the polls if anything slightly worse than it was after the SNP’s historic landslide victory in 2011. Her only achievement was to give Scottish Labour’s bitter, spiteful, tribal hatred of the Nats an accurate-looking corporeal manifestation, her face invariably contorted at First Minister’s Questions into a snarl of naked loathing for an opponent who’d done nothing other than successfully co-opt what used to be considered traditional “Labour values” after Labour abandoned them in pursuit of Middle England votes.

But we will say one thing for her – she went out with a bang.

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Today’s Herald carries a report from the initial meeting of the Smith Commission on “enhanced devolution” for the Scottish Parliament. The paper quotes from what seems to be a press release issued by the Commission, in which it explains that it thinks the people of Scotland are idiotic, drooling simpletons who’ll swallow anything.

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The Labour-friendly elements of the press made much play yesterday of an Ipsos MORI poll which showed an unusually high level of support in the UK for remaining in the EU (while ignoring one by YouGov that showed a majority in favour of leaving).

But a piece in today’s Times throws the reality into sharp relief, and illustrates why the Yes movement hasn’t simply lain down and died after losing the referendum.

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The Scotsman’s lead story last night on the left, and the same page today:

Scottish journalism, there.

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From a blog post by Hopi Sen, former head of campaigns at the Labour Party.

Scotland is one of the more dramatic areas of Labour decline (it’s now the party’s second-worst “region”), but it’s far from alone. Fewer than 80% of Labour’s 2010 general election supporters now say they’ll vote Labour in 2015. The party is shedding votes everywhere and in every demographic group, as the post notes in detail.

With barely six months to the election, Labour’s average poll lead down to around 1%, UKIP continuing to grow and the expected traditional incumbency effect, it’d be a brave voter indeed who’d put a fiver on the increasingly hapless Ed Miliband taking the keys to 10 Downing Street next year.

There’s a rather curious piece in today’s Sunday Times by the UK’s only known living psephologist, the estimable Prof. John Curtice of Strathclyde University. In it he rather blows his cover of impartiality by framing his comments as an anti-SNP warning, but nevertheless raises an interesting point, while adding to the enormous pressure on the unfortunate Smith Commission.

It’s worth taking a moment to ponder the impossibility of its task.

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The Guardian today carries an article by Gordon Brown, which echoes the content of his speech to the House Of Commons on Thursday. We’ve read it over and over again trying to make any sort of coherent sense out of it, but we’ve drawn a blank. The mighty architect of “The Vow” appears to have not the slightest idea what he actually proposes as a constitutional settlement for the UK and Scotland.

But perhaps we’ve missed something.

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We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.

And you’d think that’d be bigger news.

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Gordon Brown is expected to be up on his hind legs again in the Commons today – a second appearance in a week that’ll almost certainly be the mainly-absent opposition backbencher’s busiest period of activity in Parliament since the 2010 election.

He’ll be inexplicably getting time to lay out his views on devolution again, despite having absolutely no power to implement them, and it seems reasonable to imagine that he’ll spend a fair bit of time on the contents of the infamous “vow” he brokered days before the Scottish independence referendum.

One line of that vow ran “We agree that the UK exists to ensure opportunity and security for all by sharing our resources equitably across all four nations”. And as “pooling and sharing resources” was Mr Brown’s catchphrase during the campaign, we thought it might be worthwhile taking a look at what that means in practice.

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With reference to our post from earlier today, we couldn’t help but notice Scottish Labour whining loudly this morning about the award of the ScotRail franchise to Dutch state-owned railway company Abellio. (On what sound like very good terms.)

We asked the party’s infrastructure spokesman James Kelly what Labour would have done instead had they been in power, and got no reply. So we went and had a look, and it turned out there was a clear and simple answer.

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