Ed Miliband, who is apparently the leader of the Labour Party, is in Scotland today to make some promises about his lifelong commitment to “Home Rule”, a policy which his MSPs were flatly denying ever mentioning earlier this month.
We’re sure he’ll be as good as his word.
There’s been much discussion in the press lately about Jim Murphy’s plan to change the elusive Scottish Labour “constitution”, a document almost nobody has ever seen and which most people didn’t know even existed until a few weeks ago.
Naturally we were curious to have a wee look, so when we stumbled across a page on the Electoral Commission website which said it held copies of party constitutions and provided them on request, we thought we’d take a shot on the off-chance. We weren’t at all surprised by the reply:
“the Commission does not hold a constitution for the Scottish Labour Party per se, since they are not separately registered with us. The Labour Party is registered for GB as a whole.”
But then an alert reader asked the EC a smarter question.
We’re pretty sure the Daily Record is just trolling us on purpose at this point.
Wait, Labour pushed for a what now?
The kerfuffle on social media right now over some votes on fracking in the House of Commons tonight would probably dislodge a fair amount of gas trapped in rock by itself. Claim and counter-claim are zinging around furiously, but we eventually found a factual précis that even idiots like us could understand. Buckle up.
It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.
Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.
But readers might be wise to be sceptical.
At this morning’s Wings editorial meeting, we were discussing whether the spectacular victory for radical-left anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece last night was a bit of a beamer for Scotland. After all, the Greek electorate were faced with a lot of the same uncertainties as Scotland was in the independence referendum, except in Greece’s case they’re a lot more real.
Greeks really don’t know which currency they’ll be using this time next year, or whether they’ll still be in the EU, or whether there’ll be an exodus of big business, or whether they’ll be able to borrow money, whereas in Scotland those were baseless scare stories. Yet voters in the Hellenic Republic didn’t bottle it and decide to leave their fate in the hands of Germany.
But then we realised that was a little unfair.
Jim Murphy had an uncomfortable few minutes on Sunday Politics this morning (though in fairness, not quite as uncomfortable as those Natalie Bennett of the Greens had just endured as Andrew Neil shone some light on some of the more out-there sections of the party’s manifesto).
Murphy did his best to waffle and stall for time as he avoided almost all of Neil’s questions. He had no opinion on whether Nicola Sturgeon should take part in election debate, no view on whether Labour would work with the SNP in the event of a hung Parliament, and refused point-blank to clarify his own position in terms of standing for his current Westminster seat this May.
(Even though the BBC had told us he’d cleared that up three days ago.)
He did make one unequivocal statement, though.
Official poster from the Tories:
Official leaflet from Labour:
So if Scots vote SNP in May, both Ed Miliband and David Cameron will get in. Glad we cleared that up. We might start work on some sort of handy translation chart (“vote Green get Ulster Unionist”; “vote UKIP get Monster Raving Loony”), so if you spot any more do drop us a line.
Actually, that last one’s true, isn’t it?
Tonight’s Question Time for some reason featured a question about the SNP, which Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and UKIP representatives got to discuss at length with nobody from the SNP (or even from Scotland) there to respond. It was an enlightening insight into England’s attitude to the Scots as a whole, not just the SNP. Here’s how it went.
We recommend all of it, but UKIP’s Paul Nuttall is the star, from 3m 42s.
The media is aflame today with the claim that Jim Murphy has finally ended weeks of speculation about whether he’ll stand again for his current Westminster seat of East Renfrewshire in the general election. Numerous sources including STV, the BBC, the Scotsman and Murphy’s local press have all announced unequivocally that the MP has confirmed his candidacy.
The only slight hitch is that he’s done absolutely no such thing.
We’re a bit surprised The Sun managed to get an issue out at all today, to be honest. The editorial team must have been struggling to see through their tears of laughter after they managed to get two days of free publicity in every rival newspaper in the country and a ton of coverage from national broadcasters over a completely imaginary decision to stop featuring topless models on Page 3.
And they must have almost wept with the hilarity of getting The Guardian to line up a whole collection of its most pompous feminists to prematurely proclaim victory and parade some gloating triumphalism across several pages, before putting a winking Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth front and centre this morning and innocently pointing out that they’d never actually said anything so why was everyone acting so surprised?
Now, of course, every rival paper in the land will spend ANOTHER day or two talking about the sting, and The Sun will continue to roll on the floor and clutch its sides and get away with printing stuff like this:
And the thing is, nobody who looks like an idiot today will learn the lesson.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
