Wings Over Scotland

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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Some readers have been a bit dispirited by the findings of our Panelbase poll this week, which revealed a few quite socially-conservative views among the Scottish population and also found fairly small differences of opinion between Scots and the rest of the UK on a number of issues.

But to be downhearted about the findings is to miss a whole series of points.

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Alert readers will know that we very often like to bring to your attention both Scottish Labour’s fondness for radically rewriting history and its frequent struggles with basic counting. Today, though, the North British branch office has spectacularly outdone itself and managed to pull off both at once. This is going to be hard to beat.

Above is an extract from the official record of today’s proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. And we can only applaud Rhoda Grant’s ambition.

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We note with interest that the remarkable “I am not and have never been a Unionist” article about Jim Murphy, which vanished last night from the Daily Record website for several hours, has reappeared today. As far as we can see at a glance it’s the same as the original version with one slight alteration.

We’re not sure that was worth all the effort, lads. For most Scots, including a great many in the Labour Party, those are two interchangeable terms.

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In a publishing environment where newspaper sales right across both Scotland and the UK have been suffering an unbroken decline for several years, the news that the Sunday Herald – the only newspaper to declare support for independence before the referendum – actually managed to INCREASE its sales in 2014 by a whopping 31% after coming out for Yes is a striking story.

Here’s the headline the BBC chose to cover it under this morning.

Seems legit.