Wings Over Scotland

We’re feeling a bit stupid right now, readers. Earlier on today we sarcastically dubbed Scottish Labour “geniuses” over their plans to reintroduce alcohol (and sectarian singing) back to Scottish football at exactly the point when Scotland seemed to have finally turned the corner in its dysfunctional relationship with alcohol.

And this week vile cybernats had also been enjoying mocking a pair of hapless Labour members who’d posed outside a Fife health centre bemoaning the “clear” shortage of staffing, when in fact it had no staff at all, because it was an old closed-down facility, located right next to a brand shiny new £6m one built by the Scottish Government.

Indeed, for days now Labour have been carrying out a two-pronged stunt-photocall strategy, touring the country standing outside hospital casualty departments looking concerned about an almost entirely imaginary “A&E crisis”, while also leafleting every major football ground promising to let fans get smashed at games again.

Seeking a cheap laugh, we tweeted that we hoped they didn’t get confused and start handing out their “MOAR BOOZE!” literature outside the A&E wards, but then an alert reader pointed out that we were idiots and Jim Murphy was in fact an evil mastermind.

And they were right.

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Good news:

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In September 2011, a group of US state employees took a man called Troy Davis from his prison cell in Atlanta, Georgia to a small room and strapped him to a gurney. They inserted a needle into one of his veins, hooked it up to some tubes connected to a machine and pressed a button on the machine, knowing that it would cause lethal chemicals to be pumped into his bloodstream until he died of asphyxiation.

These people – every one of whom doubtless considered themselves an ordinary, decent, caring member of society – participated willingly in the killing despite knowing that there was an enormous degree of doubt as to whether Davis was in any way responsible for the death of the man in whose name he was being executed.

Bafflingly, very few people found this behaviour at all odd.

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One of the compensations of living in England (from the perspective of editing a website about Scottish politics) is that you get a much clearer picture of how English people – who make up 85% of the UK electorate, and as such in practice determine who the government is – see the country’s political leaders.

For those of you who don’t, here’s Charlie Brooker – a man who’s no fan of the Tories by any stretch of the imagination – casting a weary and exasperated eye over Ed “these strikes are wrong” Miliband on last night’s Weekly Wipe.

In our experience it’s a pretty accurate snapshot of how the hapless Labour leader is regarded by most left-leaning people down on this side of the border. You’ll need to have seen the rest of the episode to get the “Schofield!” joke.

There’s a very strange article on the front page of the Herald website this morning. It’s an interview with Nigel Farage in which the UKIP leader insists that his party, not the SNP, will hold the balance of power in the UK parliament after May’s election.

It’s a bold assertion given that current projections put the SNP on anywhere from 30 to 56 seats with UKIP expected to struggle to get 5 to 10. But Farage’s rationale for the statement is an interesting one.

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The abusive Facebook comments recently directed at Labour MP Margaret Curran and highlighted in a piece on the STV website today make us sigh. Not only are they horrible but they’re counter-productive, in every sense of the term – they’re not going to change Curran’s mind about anything by yelling at her, and they feed a narrative about “vile cybernats” that the media is all too eager to gleefully perpetuate.

So let’s make something clear from the off: shut up, idiots. You’re not helping.

But then let’s tell the rest of the story.

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There really isn’t very much of a news story in this morning’s Sun “exclusive” that some Labour MPs say they’d quit the party rather than work with the SNP should the electorate deliver such a result in May. One told the paper:

“I would quit the party — there’s no way I would sit alongside them.

We’ve just spent three years knocking lumps out of each other in the independence referendum, how could we then share power?”

Those of us who remember the parade of furious Scottish Labour figures going on TV and openly threatening to scupper any “rainbow coalition” involving the Nats in 2010, thereby ensuring that David Cameron and George Osborne came to power, won’t be the least bit surprised at the sheer depth of hatred and jealous rage that consumes Labour’s branch office in North Britain when the SNP are mentioned.

And there’s nothing eyebrow-raisingly new in Scottish Labour’s spiteful determination that if Scots vote against the Conservatives – but not for Labour – they should be punished with Tory governments. It’s the standard policy of electoral blackmail that the party has deployed against the rise of rivals from the left for years, and which it’s now also turning against the Greens south of the border.

But there is a telling phrase in that short quote.

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It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

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The Telegraph, 13 September 2014:

“Scotland heading for a ‘Great Depression’ after a Yes vote

A study by Deutsche Bank said a Yes vote for Scottish independence would ‘go down in history as a political and economic mistake’ on a par with Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failures by the Federal Reserve in America that triggered the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It warned that Scotland risked a similar depression if voters backed the Yes campaign on Thursday, and described the desire for independence as an ‘incomprehensible’ one which could have negative consequences ‘far beyond’ what people had imagined.

Gordon Brown said the Deutsche Bank report showed that Scotland was ‘in danger of falling through an economic trapdoor’.”

We can only assume something pretty amazing must have happened since then.

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It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.

The article concluded with some comments from Labour.

“It was reported last month that Labour will include a commitment in its general election manifesto to ensure major sporting such as the Open Championship are shown on terrestrial TV.

Scottish leader Jim Murphy told the Scotland and Sunday events like the Open and international football “shouldn’t be a minority sport for only those who can afford satellite television subscriptions”.

A party spokesman said today: “We’re happy to send the SNP Government links to all the announcements Jim Murphy and Kez Dugdale have made so that it is easier for them to adopt our policies.”

Which is, y’know, bold.

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Still confused about the difference between an “oil fund” and a “resilience fund”, folks?

So were we, but no longer. We’ve had a breakthrough.

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Posted this morning, after a week in which it was so comprehensively proven to be a complete lie that even Torcuil Crichton of the Daily Record was forced to concede it.

You almost have to grudgingly admire the sheer bull-headed tenacity of their dogged determination to prove once and for all to the people of Scotland that Labour think they’re dribbling gullible morons.

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