Wings Over Scotland

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”.)

Towards the end, though, Robertson asked Murphy the question Scottish Labour really don’t want to answer, and this time he almost landed a knockout blow.

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From politics.co.uk this morning:

“Those hoping that a Labour government would look very different from the current Conservative-led government are likely to be disappointed.

Asked by the Today programme what he would reverse from Osborne’s Budget yesterday, Ed Balls replied that there was nothing.

For those of you who missed it, me ringing in to the Kaye Adams show this morning.

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Alert readers will have to decide for themselves whether bravado or sheer desperation is to blame, but Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop themselves from lying to the people of Scotland about the formation of the next government.

Mindbogglingly, the party has just released a video in which Jim Murphy repeats the lie again, and in today’s Daily Record its Ayrshire candidate Sandra Osborne openly admits that “We are talking to people on the doorstep explaining that whoever ends up the biggest party after the election will form the next government”, despite it having been proved beyond the tiniest shred of dispute that that’s simply not true.

Fortunately, reinforcements have arrived.

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Jim Murphy’s practiced air of nonchalant bonhomie was coming apart at the seams all over today’s “Good Morning Scotland” (from 2h 10m). Pressed hard by presenter Bill Whiteford, the beleaguered Scottish Labour branch manager spluttered and blustered and interrupted constantly in a desperate attempt to stop Whiteford from even finishing any questions, never mind getting answers to them.

Murphy tried determinedly and repeatedly to punt the hopelessly-discredited line about the biggest party forming the government, on the sole basis that it had always been the case before, seemingly unaware that the election wasn’t being held in the past. He even tried to use the recent catastrophic Ashcroft polls to Labour’s advantage.

You can marvel at the entire nine-minute trainwreck by clicking the link below. But let’s just pull out that one argument and take a closer look at it.

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The election of Jim Murphy as branch office leader has so far failed to produce a shift in the party’s catastrophic polling figures north of the border, with most projections still suggesting that Labour’s Scottish seats will be reduced to single figures in May.

Last night we catalogued a series of its howlers since Murphy took over, culminating in a humiliating climbdown over some false claims about cancelled operations in the Scottish NHS. The party’s Scottish health spokeswoman Jenny Marra turned up on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the subject, and in doing so demonstrated exactly why Scottish voters are deserting it in hundreds of thousands.

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Only a few diehards in the press are still clinging this morning to the Labour fiction we exposed yesterday, namely the flat-out empirical falsehood that “the biggest party gets to form a government” in the event of a hung Parliament.

The Daily Record’s hapless political editor Torcuil Crichton desperately fought against the proven facts on Good Morning Scotland as an incredulous Iain Macwhirter looked on, and a few of the party’s more unhinged supporters battle on on social media, but after some diligent battering away with evidence it looks like we’ve finally managed to get the message through to most of a reluctant media.

But why was it ever in doubt?

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An alert reader pointed us today to this audio clip of Jim Murphy. It’s not tagged, but we THINK it’s from a Radio Clyde interview about three weeks ago which oddly didn’t seem to get picked up at the time by anyone in the media.

It’s an interesting viewpoint.

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Below is a clip from today’s “Morning Call” on BBC Radio Scotland. Speaking (from 16m 24s on the full show) are SNP MSP Mark McDonald, presenter Kaye Adams and Labour MSP Lewis Macdonald. There are a couple of noteworthy moments.

A caller named “George” had rung in concerned that the SNP might be giving up on their goal of independence, and Adams invited Mark McDonald to set his mind at rest. Here’s what happened in the next three minutes.

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We missed this on Sunday, because it was 17 minutes into on the short-lived and unlamented “Crossfire” (now binned for a Sunday edition of “Good Morning Scotland”) and therefore pretty much everyone in Scotland missed it. It’s former Labour minister Helen Liddell, or as we should properly address her, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke.

We’ve spared you her subsequent painful bleating about a general election 35 years ago that she doesn’t seem to have quite gotten over, but we couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at her curious assessment of the referendum result, which we suspect fellow guest Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell was simply too stunned to react to.

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Today we’ve become quite obsessed with Jim Murphy’s pathological avoidance of a straight answer to the question of whether income tax should be fully devolved to the Scottish Parliament or not. The BBC now has a report on his much-trailed speech in Glasgow, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First it’s worth having a listen to this.

It’s an interview taken from the “Pienaar’s Politics” podcast on Radio 5 Live earlier this month. And it makes for an intriguing study of the art of evasion.

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On his imminent election as “leader” of the Scottish Labour “party”.

Because this, readers, is the opposition.

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