Wings Over Scotland

The gift that keeps on giving.

Mr McNeill still hasn’t publicly explained how he came to be telling Labour supporters to vote Tory and let the Conservatives gain four seats on Labour, but we assume his private reasons for his “Twitter mistake” must have been really really good to win over the “comrades” in such a short space of time, so that’s nice.

The trouble is, he’s not alone.

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Some of the Scottish media has picked up on our post yesterday about the senior Labour official calling on Labour voters to tactically vote for the Tories against the SNP. The Scottish Sun and The National both carry the story, reporting that Robert McNeill has resigned his positions on the party’s Policy Forum and as chair of the East Lothian constituency party, having first joined a growing list of Labour figures to have wiped their social-media history.

(Kathy Wiles, Braden Davy, Yvonne Hama and Susan Dalgety, among many others, had preceded the hapless McNeill in attempting to obliterate their tracks after this site uncovered some of their unsavoury activities.)

And today has seen the discovery of a tweet from last month by the Labour peer Lord Moonie, caught in conversation with a couple of Conservative bloggers expressing the view that Labour would be much happier in coalition with the Tories than working with the SNP. (Echoing comments from other party sources a couple of weeks ago.)

And it got us to wondering why they don’t just do it.

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The last few days have not been proud ones for the Scottish media. Following the Daily Record’s humiliation at the hands of the independent press standards body over the Smith Commission, we don’t see this letter from the chair of the Scottish Prison Officers Association in today’s Scotsman (and the article in question doesn’t appear to have been corrected), so it looks like we’re going to have to print it here.

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Robert James McNeill is the vice chairman of the East Lothian Constituency Labour Party and chair of the Tranent Local Labour Party. He’s also a member of the Scottish Labour Party Policy Forum, which develops the Scottish Labour manifesto.

Within the last hour he’s removed all that information from his Twitter bio. But why?

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Jim Murphy in today’s Sunday Mail:

“At this election, with a cross in a box Scots can save the poorest families in Scotland £3,000 over the next parliament, because that is the average cost of the bedroom tax for those who are affected by it in Scotland.

The average annual reduction is £600.”

But hang on a minute. What bedroom tax?

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The excellent Jon Ronson has had a couple of articles published recently promoting his imminent book about the phenomenon of “internet shaming”, most recently one in yesterday’s Guardian. He talks fascinatingly with and about people who’ve had their lives ruined because they said things that weren’t illegal, but merely deemed in some way unacceptable by a self-elected mob, often led by the professionally-offended.

Some of the victims are sympathetic and others less so, according to one’s personal tastes and prejudices. But the overall picture painted is one of a world in which it’s becoming harder and harder to express opinions beyond the crushingly bland.

We saw countless examples during the independence referendum, in which comments which were often very mildly rude at worst – calling someone a “minion”, say – were inflated by press and/or social media hysteria into shock-horror scandals. (Indeed, on a few occasions this site was itself the subject of the monsterings.)

Such witch-hunts were of course done in the furtherance of a political agenda – in those cases, in the service of a No vote. But it’s interesting to see a wider version of the tactic being deployed against the SNP in the context of a UK general election.

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Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.

IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.

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The Independent Press Standards Organisation has delivered its verdict on the Daily Record’s coverage of the Smith Commission recommendations on 27 November 2014, after we lodged a complaint with the watchdog body.

We attach its findings below. (Emphases ours.)

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This is the Minister for Care and Support, Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, on last night’s Question Time, letting Scotland know its status as an equal and valued partner in the UK, a partner whose democratically-elected MPs have the same right to have their voice heard on behalf of their constituents as those from anywhere else.

Glad we cleared that one up.

These are starting to get a bit surreal.

“Vote Labour, get SNP!”

“Vote UKIP, get trade unions!”

We’ve added them to the list. Keep ’em peeled, folks!

We got fooled like big old chumps earlier this afternoon. Scottish Labour apparatchik and former “Better Together” director Blair McDougall posted a series of tweets about whether the party who wins the most seats in a Westminster election gets to form the government, which sounded exactly like the ones Scottish Labour have been posting for the last few weeks before they were exposed as being nonsense.

The big comedy reveal was that they turned out to have been said by Alex Salmond in 2007, talking about the Holyrood election of that year which the SNP won.

It was a bona fide zinger. So what point did the cunning prank prove?

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It’s not often you get to see someone actually thinking out loud.

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