The former Scottish Secretary’s excuse for lying on air is a feeble, Hothersall-esque semantic dodge, and his excuse for not resigning is that his years of service as a constituency MP ought to outweigh the fact that a UK government minister abused his office and lied to the public in order to undermine the democratically-elected leader of Scotland and cling on to his own job.
Having now heard the case for the defence, readers can reach their own verdicts.
It’s come awfully late, but we’ve finally got an answer to a question people have been asking Jim Murphy since last December.
In an interview with the BBC’s Gary Robertson this morning, the Scottish Labour regional manager told listeners that should he win the East Renfrewshire seat in next month’s election, he’d stay in the job for the full five-year term, but would also stand for election as a Holyrood MSP in 2016.
Waking up bleary-eyed this morning at 6.45am, we reached over to switch on Good Morning Scotland, just in time for the news headlines round-up. This is what we heard:
As our veteran readers will know, Duncan Hothersall is a prominent Scottish Labour activist, occasional BBC and STV pundit, prospective Labour parliamentary candidate and editor of LabourHame, the party’s favoured blog in Scotland.
Earlier today we got an email from someone who wanted us to ask him a question.
This is an extract from this morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 (starts about 2h 5m in), in which James Naughtie expresses an unusually frank and forthright opinion on Jim Murphy’s claim about the biggest party forming the government.
Like some sort of out-of-control, unstoppable lying machine, Scottish Labour keep telling the electorate that the party with the most seats in a hung parliament is the one that forms the government, and that the only way to prevent the Conservatives from returning to power is for Labour to be the biggest party.
(Because if the answer is yes then Labour’s entire Scottish election strategy – “Vote SNP get Tories!” – crumbles to dust, and if it’s no then Labour is saying that it’d be prepared to abandon not just Scotland but the whole UK to another five years of Conservative government purely out of spite against the SNP.)
Three of the party’s elected representatives have now been asked the question on air – James Kelly MSP by John Mackay of Scotland Tonight a week ago, branch office leader Jim Murphy by BBC Scotland’s Gary Robertson yesterday, and the shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran last night (below), again by STV’s John Mackay.
As you can see, Scotland’s voters still await an answer. But on this page we’ll keep track of all the swerves, evasions and dodges until we get one, if we ever do.
We’re going to compile all of these onto a single page soon, because as you can see, Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop telling this lie.
Today’s expert saying “Does it, aye?” (and the latest in a long and distinguished line) is Peter Riddell from the Institute For Government, speaking on Radio 4’s “World At One” this afternoon (from 35m).
Listeners to today’s “Good Morning Scotland” were treated (from 2h 7m at that link) to a consummate masterclass in the art of evasion from Labour’s Scottish branch-office manager Jim Murphy. The bulk of a 13-minute segment was devoted to Murphy’s claim that a Labour vote in this May’s general election would bring about an end to foodbanks in Scotland, although the pledge steadily degraded as interviewer Gary Robertson pressed fruitlessly for detail.
(Murphy refused to say if or when any money generated by a Labour UK government would be given to the Scottish Government, wouldn’t be drawn on when the need for foodbanks would be eradicated, shot down a straw man on benefit sanctions and eventually conceded that in fact there would always be foodbanks, by way of a brief diversion to “I do a lot of work for charity but I don’t like to talk about it”.)
