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.
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.
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.
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.
Willie Rennie, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, 12 January 2015:
Tavish Scott, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Tuesday 3 May 2011:
Still, at least he was wrong about Salmond fiddling the referendum result, eh?
Ever since the referendum, we’ve documented the various ways in which Unionists have constantly tried to rewrite history and inflate the magnitude of their victory.
We had Alistair Darling saying before the vote that 60-40 would have been too close for comfort, but then his team attempting to portray 55-45 as a resounding win, and we had the Labour peer Baroness Liddell try to claim the real result was 67-33 based on a near-Stalinist approach to voter attribution.
And yesterday, bless his heart, No campaign mascot Wee Willie Rennie had a go.
Followers of our Twitter account will know that we’ve highlighted on many occasions since September the bizarrely angry attitude of much of the victorious side in the independence referendum. Despite having won, commentators and activists on the No side have undertaken a series of bitter and miserable articles and rants seemingly less than delighted at having come first in a two-horse race.
We’ve been a bit of a loss to work out why. They may have only cleared the bar by 5%, but it’s a reasonably comfortable margin if not exactly an easy cruise over the finishing line (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor). And embarrassingly we needed some help from one of the thicker sub-species of BritNat troll to finally work it out.
It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.
Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?
The Scottish media has been predictably full of Sincere Jim Murphy’s proclamation this weekend that Scottish Labour is “a renewed party for a post-referendum era in Scottish politics. I want Yes and No voters alike to be able to look at the purpose and principles of the Scottish Labour party and find a home there.”
This is Labour’s 2015 general election candidate for the Western Isles seat.
Should we bother compiling a big list of similar “separatists are the filthiest scum of the Earth” quotes from other Scottish Labour MPs who are standing for election this May, or should we just consider the point made and move on, readers?
Pretty much the entire Scottish media yesterday carried a sad story about the funeral in Forfar of a young soldier who tragically died after serving in Afghanistan.
Private Mark Connolly wasn’t killed in combat but died after being punched by a comrade in a fight. Wrangling between his widow and mother had delayed his funeral for four years, and spilled over into angry confrontations as he was laid to rest, which the papers reported with considerable relish and plenty of photographs, and even video footage from the graveside.
The story was picked up in the Scotsman, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph’s Scotland section, STV News, BBC Scotland, the Courier and more. Curiously, though, one aspect of the unfortunate event was almost completely written out of the coverage.
We’ve had some fun with the appointment of John McTernan as Scottish Labour’s new chief of staff this week. But he’s far from the only talent in branch manager Jim Murphy’s backroom team. Particularly alert readers may recall an obscure figure from the independence campaign by the name of Blair McDougall, who was little-seen in the last year of the debate but we think was the director of “Better Together”.
It seems his modus operandi hasn’t changed much since the referendum.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
