Wings Over Scotland

Given that he’s the last Labour MP left in Scotland, it’s perhaps just as well that Ian Murray is a quite interesting figure, because there’s going to be a lot of attention on him in the next five years.

Unlike the over-promoted, under-skilled, Buggins’-turn knife-and-fork-operators who’ve disgraced what were previously weigh-the-vote Labour constituencies in Scotland for decades, the member for Edinburgh South has some genuinely admirable qualities. As we noted before the election, he’s earned a reputation as a hard-working local MP: holding surgeries, replying diligently to letters and speaking up in the Commons.

He’s got a sense of humour about his lonely role, he’s the only Unionist politician ever to talk to Wings on the record, and on account of running a large tent at the Bath Festival most years he’s well known to several of our good friends in the city, who all speak highly of his personal character and work ethic.

So in all seriousness, we’re not without respect for the man. Which makes it all the more painful every time he opens his mouth.

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Ever since the SNP’s unexpected majority in 2011, there’s been a constant low-level whine of “one-party state” from various elements of the Unionist establishment. (The first example we could find from a quick Google search was Liberal Democrat buffoon Sir Malcolm Bruce in September of that year.)

It’s a curiously bitter and irrational way to refer to the outcome of democratic elections held under proportional representation, reflecting a worrying contempt for the views of voters, but after the SNP saw the benefits of First Past The Post in May 2015 (having spent decades being its victim), the angry bleating has become far more noticeable.

(The most recent politician to use the phrase was the Lib Dems’ current leader Tim Farron. Perhaps the party is engaging in displacement activity to distract itself from its craven abandonment in 2010 of its lifelong commitment to introduce PR, selling its principles cheaply for ministerial cars and a referendum on what Nick Clegg called the “miserable little compromise” of AV, which was then lost by a humiliating margin.)

But today someone really kicked it up a notch.

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The editor of the New Statesman just tweeted this image, trailing an interview with Jim Murphy, who alert readers may recall led Scottish Labour for a few months this year before its apocalyptic disaster of a general election campaign which saw it lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats it won in 2010:

Oh, wait – maybe he’s trying to claim the credit for it.

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So today we read this:

And it was good.

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There’s a remarkable story on the BBC News website today about the latest findings of the British Election Study, last seen destroying the myth that fear of the SNP damaged Labour in England. The piece focuses on the discovery that being seen as “too left-wing” does NOT, in fact, cost Labour votes, despite the hysterical warnings of supposedly leftist pundits.

But there’s a more startling fact buried right at the end.

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Dear Blairite MP,

I’m writing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members; some new, and some, like me, who have been loyal party members throughout our adult lives. I’m not writing to any one of you in particular.

The ones I’m addressing will know who they are.

It’s time to talk about us.

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All five of the opinion pollsters who regularly poll on Scottish politics (Panelbase, YouGov, TNS, Ipsos Mori and Survation) have now published surveys in the past two weeks asking the independence question. So it seems reasonable to expect there’ll be no more polls before the anniversary of the referendum on Friday.

Given the conventional wisdom that the economy, underpinned by that pesky volatile oil, was the main reason not enough Scots could be persuaded to take the leap into self-government, readers might expect that the dramatic collapse in the oil price since last year (when we checked today it was trading at just over $47 a barrel, less than half the $97 it was at the start of September 2014) would only have cemented voters’ feeling that they made the right decision.

So why is the opposite true?

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Comedy buffoon Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph:

Actual donations received: No campaign £4.3 million, Yes campaign £2.8 million.

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Turns out it’s not just Scotland the media commentariat knows nothing about.

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This happened last night:

Despite having only raised £5,470 of its £50,000 target, the fundraiser set up by a veteran Lib Dem activist (or, in BBC language, an “Aberdeen woman”) was suddenly closed down, with no explanation offered.

So what do we know?

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It’s a pretty widely-held axiom that supporters of independence rule the internet. While there are online No sites – mainly demented Loyalist affairs on Facebook – none of them has anything like the reach of even the middle-ranked Yes ones.

Where the independence movement has always trailed a long way behind is conventional media. For most of the modern era there hasn’t been a single newspaper or broadcast outlet that supported Yes. Now the Sunday Herald and The National have stepped into that space, with encouraging results, and NewsShaft are doing increasingly exciting things on air (though still web-based).

Clearly, though, more is needed, and one of the most impressive productions is one which has existed for almost a year already, but is curiously little-heralded.

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Here’s Atul Hatwal, editor of the influential Labour website Labour Uncut, speaking first in July and then reviewing his position with the benefit of hindsight in August.

Corbyn just won the leadership election in the first round with 60% of the vote. Don’t give up the day job, Atul. Well, actually, maybe you should.

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