Wings Over Scotland

The Daily Record gets up high on its outrage horse this morning with a front-page story titled “Double-crossed on devo”, echoing Jim Murphy’s claim of yesterday that the Tories’ manifesto pledge on “English votes for English laws” is a “betrayal” of the “Vow” signed by the three UK party leaders before the independence referendum.

Unsurprisingly, the Record gives rather less prominence to the news that the Vow isn’t worth the fake parchment it wasn’t written on than it did to repeatedly hyping it up and then proclaiming that it had already been delivered.

But there’s a twist.

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We try to avoid openly editorialising on this site, readers. While unashamedly partisan in our leanings, as a rule we prefer to present the facts and let people come to their own conclusions from the evidence.

But we’re not sure we’ve ever seen anything more craven and pathetic than this.

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A super-alert reader pointed out something about today’s Sunday Politics that we hadn’t noticed. Before the galaxy-class trainwreck that was the Scottish leaders’ debate, the networked section of the show had a piece on Scottish polling, and our eagle-eyed viewer spotted that the chart of projected seats wasn’t in proportion.

So we measured, and this is what it should have looked like.

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There’s very little actual political news today, so the papers have largely been forced to either basically not have any at all (the Sunday Post and Scottish Sun On Sunday) or make up totally mad stuff for laughs to fill the space.

We’ve picked out some highlights for you below.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Liberal Democrat manifesto 2015:

I voted for this pathetic shower of useless snivellers for 23 years, folks. I’ve learned my lesson. Once again, I can only hang my head and beg forgiveness.

That slacker Chris Cairns is on holiday again, readers. But don’t worry, we’ve still got some chucklesome weekend funnies for you.

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After this week’s STV and BBC debates, in which the Scottish Labour branch-office manager’s combative performances were favourably received by the Scottish media, Wings exclusively interviews armed-forces enthusiast Jim Murphy for a response to the latest numbers from YouGov, pausing first for the delivery of some refreshments.

The deeply ideologically-principled Liberal Democrats, readers:

Can anyone help us collect the full set?

Last night the not-noticeably-cybernat Liberal Democrat Voice website declared that a young woman in the audience of the STV leaders’ debate, professing herself to be an undecided who’d been “totally convinced” by Jim Murphy to vote Labour, appeared to be the same person as one who’d previously appeared in Labour leaflets.

Then this happened.

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that revelation having teenage lassie in Tuesdays STV debate was a Labour plant. They are desperadoes.

— Misssy M (@MisssyM) April 9, 2015

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We already KNOW the solution to the problem of panellists shouting all over each other. It’s used every day in the Scottish Parliament: the chair is in charge of all the microphones and only the person whose turn it is to speak gets theirs switched on.

If someone else raises a good point while someone is speaking, the chair can hear it and bring them in in a controlled manner if appropriate, rather than the self-defeating, time-wasting exercise in irony that is shouting at everyone to stop shouting.

The fact that the system is never used therefore leads us to only one possible logical conclusion – the broadcasters WANT chaotic rammies where nobody gets to make their points properly. As for why, you’d have to ask them.

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.

Here’s how the conversation went.

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Alert readers will probably recall that a couple of days ago we explained this site’s most fundamental purpose as being to teach people “how to read between the lines [and] and spot what isn’t being said” in newspapers, so we’re grateful to today’s Daily Record for providing us with a timely example of the second phenomenon.

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