Wings Over Scotland

When someone sent us a link last week to a picture of an Anas Sarwar election leaflet, we were immediately struck by the fact that it had the weird characteristic of being ostensibly handwritten but underlining every word in a sentence individually, which reminded us of one we’d seen from Douglas Alexander back in January.

So after a busy weekend of saving stray cats from going blind, we went to dig the two leaflets out, in the modest hope of getting a quick cheap joke about them both using the same fake-handwriting font. But instead we got a bit of a surprise.

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From today’s Sun (English edition only, natch).

This is how Scotland is seen in the largest part of the UK today. There’s nothing at all new about Scots being portrayed as “stealing” money rightfully belonging to England, of course, nor in the stereotype depicted by the Jimmy hat. It’s the word on the placard that tells the story: “immigrant”.

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A lot of people this week quoted a line supposedly from the former Labour cabinet minister Roy Jenkins, which runs “a statement is only interesting if a sane man could say the opposite”. We haven’t been able to verify if he ever really said that or not, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s true either way.

So where that leaves this mess is anyone’s guess.

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More than two weeks still to go. We don’t really know what to say, readers.

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Last night: yes.

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Here’s a clip from last night’s Question Time from Leeds, in which Anna Soubry MP for the Conservatives, Lucy Powell MP for Labour, Charles Kennedy MP for the Lib Dems, ardent Unionist Ian Hislop from Private Eye and various audience members spent 20 minutes attacking the SNP, with no SNP representative present.

(The closest thing was Natalie Bennett, leader of the Greens in England and Wales, who was relentlessly mocked, derided and harangued from all sides for most of the programme’s duration, including by the “anti-establishment” Hislop.)

It seems to us that the solution to the problem is simple.

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For some time, readers, we’ve been puzzling to ourselves about quite why the idea of having to work with the SNP in the UK parliament enrages the Labour Party quite so much. Because it doesn’t make any rational sense.

Indeed, on any intelligent analysis the arrangement currently suggested by opinion polls is a dream outcome for the party. Think about it logically for a moment. Minority government lifts the burden of responsibility from your shoulders – there’s always someone else to blame if you bail on a manifesto promise, because you can say “We didn’t have a majority to push it through”.

(The SNP, it should of course be recorded, took advantage of this benefit of minority government more than once at Holyrood between 2007 and 2011)

But in Labour’s specific case in 2015, there’s what seems an even bigger boon.

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Unionist politicians, journalists and trolls have barely been able to contain themselves with glee at today’s figures suggesting that Scotland’s economy was weaker in the last fiscal year than in previous years (though still healthy). We’ll keep this short.

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The Steve Bell cartoon in yesterday’s Guardian caused a fairly predictable reaction. SNP supporters and Yes voters were offended, some Guardian journalists drew ludicrous defensive comparisons citing Charlie Hebdo – as if people had called for Bell to be beheaded, rather than just expressed the opinion that the cartoon was nasty and racist – and lovers of comedy went off scratching their heads after fruitless attempts to understand what the joke was supposed to be.

(“It’s a quote!”, shouted quite a few people, naming about a dozen different historical figures as the alleged source of a line about trying everything once, but none of them offering anything by way of explanation on how that was connected to any comment or policy of Nicola Sturgeon’s or the SNP’s.)

Anyone naively thinking that the publication of the cartoon was just an unfortunate lapse or oversight will have been disappointed by today’s paper, which carries another painfully unfunny and incomprehensible Nat-bashing effort from Bell, although this time the offence is limited to the portrayal of Sturgeon and Alex Salmond as a pair of stereotypical kilt-wearing Jocks.

(The caption explains the strip as being purportedly about “Salmond and Sturgeon’s Highland fling”, but we haven’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. We’re not aware of them having visited the Highlands recently and we can’t think of any characteristic of full fiscal autonomy that resembles a traditional dance.)

Unionists, meanwhile, indignantly pointed out to some complainants that attacking the SNP isn’t the same thing as attacking Scots as a whole. But as media hysteria about the apparently-unconscionable prospect of Scottish MPs influencing a UK government reaches fever pitch, that distinction is getting less and less meaninfgul.

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These are getting so numerous now we needed a place to keep track.

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As promised earlier, here’s the full glory of Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray’s stellar performance on Sunday Politics Scotland today.

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Lovers of blood sports enjoyed a very special treat on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland, as Gordon Brewer got his teeth firmly around the throat of hapless Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray and shook him like a rag doll for ten toe-curling minutes.

We’ll have the entire 18-rated clip for you later, but Brewer was having so much fun tormenting Murray by repeatedly demanding an answer to the question of whether his party would rule out an electoral deal with the SNP that he didn’t notice when, at about the 15th time of asking, he actually got one.

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