Wings Over Scotland

One of the most interesting things about the recent Ashcroft polls is the flurry of articles they’ve provoked in the media, as London-based political commentators try to outdo each other in displaying their complete ignorance of Scottish politics.

It’s eerily reminiscent of the sudden surge of activity when the gaps in referendum polls reached margin-of-error levels, and metropolitan journalists suddenly realised that Scotland was taking the referendum far more seriously than they were.

Two of the most revealing have been in the Spectator, with James Forsyth saying the Unionist collaborations in the No campaign “marked a recognition that Great Britain is far bigger, and far more important, than party politics”, and Fraser Nelson becoming Scottish Labour’s most unlikely cheerleader, saying “Finally, a confession. I’d like the Tories to win the next election, but not as much as I want Jim Murphy to do well”.

But amid all the outpourings of grief and befuddlement, it’s startling how little analysis there really is into why the UK is in the situation it currently is. And it’s odd because the answer isn’t the least bit complicated.

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The letter below is extraordinary, readers. See if it fits with what you remember.

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Only a few diehards in the press are still clinging this morning to the Labour fiction we exposed yesterday, namely the flat-out empirical falsehood that “the biggest party gets to form a government” in the event of a hung Parliament.

The Daily Record’s hapless political editor Torcuil Crichton desperately fought against the proven facts on Good Morning Scotland as an incredulous Iain Macwhirter looked on, and a few of the party’s more unhinged supporters battle on on social media, but after some diligent battering away with evidence it looks like we’ve finally managed to get the message through to most of a reluctant media.

But why was it ever in doubt?

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Even we can’t quite believe this one, readers.

Good grief, where do we even start?

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There’s currently a fake “petition” on the Labour website.

Ostensibly it’s gathering signatures representing opposition to the bedroom tax, but in fact its only purpose is to harvest email addresses so that Labour can then bombard unwitting recipients with dodgy, untruthful solicitations for cash. (What would actually be the point of a petition about the bedroom tax at this stage?)

That’s not the terrible thing about it, though.

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We’ve already said all we’ve got to say on this one.

Kate Devlin of the Herald has been a political journalist as long as we can remember.

So it’s quite surprising that she’s apparently never heard of Gordon Brown before.

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Since we’ve been talking about mad letters from Scottish Labour MPs today, we’re sharing this one with you too. We’ve been trying to make sense of it all evening.

We haven’t made any progress. It’s not just a simple accidental transposition of words, because if you switch “increased” and “decreased” around it’s still gibberish – why would the threat have decreased because of proliferation? If anyone can explain it, do drop us a line.

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Because there’s really no satire we can add to this magnificent zoomery:

So we might as well pop out to the shops for a bit.

With a knife-edge general election just 90-odd days away, we must confess ourselves surprised at the sudden rash of candour/indiscipline (depending on how generously you want to frame it) that’s broken out in Scottish Labour.

It started soon after the referendum, when Edinburgh Labour chairman Trevor Davies felt confident enough, with the vote won, to announce on an officially-backed Labour website that his primary loyalty was to his party rather than to the people of Scotland, under the startlingly blunt headline “Labour first, Scottish second”.

But any notion that the comments represented nothing more than a vainglorious and momentary slip from a loose cannon were soon dispelled.

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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.

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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.

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