Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The No camp really do seem to be the world’s worst winners. In a mischievous piece of trolling today, the First Minister announced that the SNP’s policy of not voting on English matters at Westminster was to come to an end, and that it would intervene for the protection of the NHS, on the reasonable grounds of avoiding Barnett cuts to the Scottish budget were privatisation south of the border to lead to lower spending.

The reaction from Labour and the Tories was predictable, with the latter accusing Sturgeon of throwing principle “out the window”. George Osborne, furthermore, was quoted in the Telegraph telling a Commons committee that:

“I think it would be very unfair to the whole United Kingdom if we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was beholden on Scottish Nationalist votes in the next Parliament.”

And readers might be forgiven for thinking “Hang on, isn’t that what you wanted?”

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It is sometimes said, unkindly, that in parts of Scotland it would be possible to get a monkey elected as a Labour MP, so long as said monkey was wearing a red rosette.

Here, not entirely unrelatedly, is Brian Donohoe (Central Ayrshire), earlier today.

Um, just a couple of points.

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There are sacred rules, except when you don’t have to bother with them.

The beauty of an unwritten “constitution”, eh readers?

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Last week the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine – a figure often singled out for criticism by both Unionist parties and the media – came under fire once more for a column she’d written in the Daily Record, in which she questioned the motivations behind Labour’s desire to devolve more power away from the Scottish Parliament to local councils.

It’s a point this site was making as far back as 2012. Scottish Labour have given up on any hope of winning a Holyrood election in the forseeable future – the latest poll of Scottish Parliament voting intentions puts the SNP on over 50%, to Labour’s 26% – so the party has suddenly discovered a passion for local devolution that it oddly chose not to enact while it was in control at Holyrood for the best part of a decade.

But McAlpine’s point that Scots tend to trust the Scottish Parliament more than any other elected body was immediately misrepresented as an attack on hard-working and honest councillors. Yet the reality is that there’s an empirical measure of democratic accountability (and therefore trust), and it’s a measure in which Holyrood unarguably comes out on top.

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There’s a curious piece in today’s Herald, which we can’t be bothered linking to, in which ubiquitous pundit David Torrance makes a whole series of almost entirely inaccurate speculations about the motivations behind our Panelbase poll from last week. (Torrance, of course, is the commentator about whom Alex Salmond wrote an amusingly sarcastic letter to the same paper pointing out that despite appointing himself the former FM’s “biographer”, he didn’t know him at all.)

We didn’t announce beforehand that we were conducting the poll. Had we been greatly surprised or disappointed by its findings, we were under no obligation whatsoever to make all or any of them public. We could have cherry-picked only the ones we found most favourable to our cause – like the fact that Scots want to stay in Europe while the rest of the UK wants out – or simply pretended the whole thing never happened.

(The money was already spent. We don’t get a refund if we keep the results secret.)

David Torrance didn’t bother asking us why we’d commissioned the poll, but instead wrote a column based solely on his incorrect assumptions. Which is odd, as in so far as the very little we’ve conversed with him, we’ve done so cordially, and were happy to post him his own print edition of the Wee Blue Book when he asked last year, even despite past incidents like this.

We’ve always been happy to provide mainstream-media journalists with quotes when asked. So we’d just like to remind Mr Torrance that our Twitter account is here, our Facebook page is here, and our contact form is here. We’re not hard to reach. If he wants to know why we did something or what we think about anything, all he needs to do is drop us a line, rather than make stuff up and get it wrong.

…is eternal vigilance, chums. Turn your back on Unionists and the media – for the sake of argument we’ll say that’s two things – for a second and they’ll start trying to slip lies out into the public consciousness, from which place they’re notoriously hard to dislodge. (Kim Jong-Un’s mythical Scottish restaurant is a recent case in point. It’s now a comedy staple, despite having been completely fabricated.)

So it’s always worth keeping a close eye on this site’s dear old pal, Labour candidacy hopeful and media favourite Duncan Hothersall, for an early sight of which falsehoods the party will be trying to propagate next.

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