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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, idiots, investigation, uk politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: The Vow
Category
analysis, comment, history, media, scottish politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: and finally
Category
comment, scottish politics, wtf
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.
Category
comment, scottish politics, wtf
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: the bain principle
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, history, scottish politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, investigation, scottish politics
We’re pretty sure the Daily Record is just trolling us on purpose at this point.

Wait, Labour pushed for a what now?
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: and finallyflat-out lies
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
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.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, comment, football, scottish politics, uk politics