Wings Over Scotland

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

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Remember before the referendum, readers, when the £30bn cost of decommissioning oil platforms was a nightmarish unaffordable millstone around a future Scotland’s neck that proved it couldn’t be independent?

It turns out it wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

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This week Scottish Labour quietly abandoned their “biggest party forms the government” election campaign after it was comprehensively debunked by this site and, belatedly, the mainstream media. An alert reader reminded us this evening of how the party wasn’t always so attached to the rules.

Because back in 2007, when Labour was neither the biggest party nor the incumbent administration, it had a damn good try at forming the government anyway.

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All this year we’ve been noticing a curious re-writing of history in the Scottish and UK media. It’s spanned left-wing and right-wing press, and even Yes-friendly voices like Iain Macwhirter and the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier have been sucked in.

Yet it’s such a fundamentally bizarre misunderstanding of a political system that’s now been running in Scotland for 16 years that we’re bewildered at the way everyone’s suddenly decided that it happened.

The latest occurrence of this odd phenomenon was in yesterday’s Daily Record, and the subject is the newly-alleged “informal deal” between the minority SNP government of 2007-11 and the Scottish Conservatives.

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The election of Jim Murphy as branch office leader has so far failed to produce a shift in the party’s catastrophic polling figures north of the border, with most projections still suggesting that Labour’s Scottish seats will be reduced to single figures in May.

Last night we catalogued a series of its howlers since Murphy took over, culminating in a humiliating climbdown over some false claims about cancelled operations in the Scottish NHS. The party’s Scottish health spokeswoman Jenny Marra turned up on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the subject, and in doing so demonstrated exactly why Scottish voters are deserting it in hundreds of thousands.

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There’s been considerable mirth in nationalist circles ever since Jim Murphy became leader of the Scottish Labour branch office late last year. Announcing that he wanted to “reach out” to Yes voters, his idea of an olive branch was to hire three of the most divisive and obnoxious figures to be found anywhere in his party’s entire hinterland, in a move about as conciliatory and unifying as when Rangers signed Mo Johnston.

Counter-intuitively, the link-up with Blair McDougall (who headed Murphy’s successful leadership bid) is the one that makes the most sense. After all, as “Better Together” campaign director McDougall was responsible for turning a 30-point lead for No into a 10-point one, so he clearly knows something about how to appeal to Yes people.

But for a man widely cited as smart and savvy, Murphy also staffing his office with comically unpleasant Twitter troll John McTernan and the nutter-fringe imbecile Susan Dalgety – someone who was last seen resigning in disgrace after likening the SNP to the Omagh bombers – was harder to understand.

And the non-stop trainwreck that has followed leaves only one explanation.

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We’ve had the satire, now the real ones.

We’re working on a diagram.

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Do you remember the old days, readers? We’re talking about the far-off era of ancient history when Labour insisted that the worst, most evil, most right-wing thing that any government could do was to cut Corporation Tax, and that it was vital Scotland didn’t become independent in case that catastrophe occurred:

Obviously that means 2013 and 2014, rather than the prehistoric days of 2008, when Labour was frantically slashing the tax at every chance it got, and promising more cuts as soon as possible. And it couldn’t possibly be the current policy, because backflipping on it yet AGAIN would just be absurd, right?

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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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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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