Wings Over Scotland

Our alert readers will probably be aware of the psychological phenomenon commonly known as the five stages of grief. If not, there’s a rather good piece by Andrew Nicoll in today’s Scottish Sun about it in the context of Scottish Labour.

But while perceptive, Nicoll is a little behind the times, because it appears that the party’s branch office manager Jim Murphy has invented a sixth.

Welcome, viewers, to the new final stage of grief: delusion.

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The Sunday Times front page today reports (although in fact we can’t find the story anywhere on its website or in its iPad app) the 8,745th “intervention” by Gordon Brown in Scottish politics, the thing which is at least notionally still his actual day job.

We’re going to need someone to explain to us why even the punch-drunk inhabitants of Scottish Labour HQ could possibly imagine that to be a good idea.

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A variant on the story below appears in most of the right-wing press today.

That’s the Daily Mail version, which is the most detailed. The Express’s reporting was similar. But in order to manufacture a grievance on behalf of UKIP and the Tories, every paper which covers the story is required to torture the data beyond all reason.

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In the wake of the latest Ashcroft polls, the only line being deployed by Scottish Labour is that the projected outcome of an SNP landslide would be great news for the Conservatives and lead to David Cameron returning in triumph to Downing Street. One would presume, then, that the Tory press is delighted by the prospect.

So let’s check out some stories from today’s Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Mail.

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We know we’ve made this point several times before. But can someone explain to us again how there’s no significant difference between the (broad, collective) political outlook of the respective peoples of Scotland and England? Because if there isn’t, doing this kind of thing just doesn’t make any sense at all.

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Careful now.

(Polls here.)

“Scottish Labour” apparently launched its election “manifesto” somewhere in Scotland today. The “leader” of the fringe “party”, Jon Murnaghan or something, seemingly got a bit confused and made a number of pledges regarding devolved issues over which the Westminster government to be elected next month will have no control whatsoever, and would properly belong in a manifesto for the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

Mr Morley or whatever his name is, who – assuming he wins his own seat – will be an insignificant backbench MP in the event of Ed Miliband’s Labour party winning the election, also said a bunch of other stuff about the SNP being “bad” because they refused to tell him what would be in their 2016 manifesto, further supporting the idea that the agitated branch official had lost track of what year it was.

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So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?

Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?

Of tonight’s debate.

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Last night’s juxtaposition of somewhat contradictory front covers on the Herald and Scottish Daily Mail was modestly amusing, but nothing new. We pointed out weeks ago that papers on both the left and the right were – often on the same days – painting the SNP as hand-in-glove allies of either Labour or the Tories according to whatever suited their own agendas, and nothing’s changed in that respect.

But it’s interesting to take a look behind the headlines of the respective stories and see the degree to which the truth can be bent, exaggerated or in some cases simply made up from thin air.

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How long do you think the papers can keep pretending that all the other papers don’t exist, or that we don’t see any of them, folks?

…hangs heavy about Scottish Labour. In an extraordinary piece on the STV website, the party today appeared to downgrade its bold assertion of just a few months ago that it could hold all 41 seats it won in Scotland in 2010, and perhaps win even more, to simply getting more than the SNP.

But the most remarkable thing happened at the end.

That, readers, is quite the admission. That’s a party which has utterly dominated UK politics in Scotland for six decades openly acknowledging that its entire campaign in the last three weeks will be based on railing against a complete fantasy.

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