There’s so little happening in Scottish politics today, readers, that the Scottish Sun has been reduced to interviewing a brick. And no, that’s not rhyming slang.
Frankly, folks, at that point we may as well have the day off.
On last night’s Scotland Tonight, prospective Scottish Labour deputy “leader” Katy Clark MP told the nation that “it could be Scotland that lets us down”.
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. By “us” she meant the Labour Party, and she went on to elaborate, telling the old Labour story about how UK general elections are about an Old Firm-style showdown betweeen two parties and how it was in essence the duty of Scots to vote Labour to keep the Tories out at Westminster, seemingly unaware that just as with the Old Firm, most people despise both of them pretty much equally.
(And conveniently overlooking the fact that Scots voted overwhelmingly Labour in 2010 and got the Tories anyway, as Labour obstinately refused to consider a “rainbow coalition” because they hated the SNP too much. What Scots learned that year was that Labour would rather let Tories rule Scotland than be civil to left-wing nationalists.)
The comments followed just a couple of days after Holyrood Magazine editor Mandy Rhodes had penned an article about the Scottish branch’s current woes that had a very telling first paragraph.
Alert readers will know that we like to keep you updated on the progress of our Freedom Of Information requests. Way back in May this year we sent one regarding the infamous unpublished opinion poll, and got a response the following month.
We weren’t very happy with it, though, and we followed it up. And today, just six months after the initial request, we got a final reply.
One week after the independence referendum we posted about a fundraiser by the producers of Dateline Scotland. It was an unusual fundraiser, in that it didn’t promise to actually produce anything – the team simply wanted money to sustain them while they worked towards something much bigger. The fundraiser was a massive success, reaching more than three times its target in the blink of an eye.
And today the something bigger started to take shape.
Earlier today we published an email from Daily Record editor Murray Foote about “The Vow”. In it he referred to an editorial published in the paper on 8 September, attacking the “confused” and “shambolic” position of the three Unionist parties on further devolution to Scotland in the event of a No vote.
The infamous “Vow” was their response. When publishing it on 16 September, two days before the referendum, the Record announced on its front page that “NOW VOTERS CAN MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE”, thereby implying that “The Vow” had delivered what the 8 September editorial had demanded.
Readers can judge for themselves.
Disappointingly, we haven’t received a reply from Daily Record editor Murray Foote to our email yesterday inquiring into the provenance of “The Vow”.
However, an alert reader who wrote to him yesterday did. You can read it below.
Below is a letter from the editor of the Daily Record sent to a Wings reader yesterday (and, we presume, to many others). We thought you might find it interesting.
We thought you might be interested to see some of the working of this post from yesterday. Of the 2.4m votes cast in Scotland in the 2010 UK general election, not far short of a million – if a recent YouGov poll is to be believed – are currently likely to be cast for different parties in 2015. And it’s intriguing to see where they’ll go.
Keen followers of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish Labour, have in recent days found themselves experiencing something of a deja vu overload. Leadership contender Jim Murphy has been all over the media recycling apologies and pledges of reform dating back up to seven years from previous leaders.
But this morning readers could be forgiven for finding themselves a little confused.
To his credit, Ed Miliband seems to have noticed that his party is crumbling beneath his feet. The rot is spreading down from Scotland, and Labour’s vote in Rochester & Strood – a seat it held, with slightly different boundaries, as recently as 2010 – has plummeted to just 16% despite voters in the constituency naming the NHS (usually Labour’s strongest field) as their top priority.
And when modern-day Labour panics, it reaches for a little hammer and smashes the glass on a box marked “IN CASE OF ABSOLUTE EMERGENCY TRY SOCIALISM”, in which it keeps a very old, moth-eaten piece of paper titled “House of Lords reform”.
So today Miliband suddenly pulled what seems to be a brand-new box-fresh policy out of – well, let’s be polite and say “the ether”.
The Lords is to be abolished, we’re told, and replaced with a new elected “Senate”, which will conveniently also serve as some form of regional devolution, though its specific responsibilities and powers have – readers will doubtless be quite astonished to hear – not been laid out.
Mr Miliband’s only problem will be getting anyone to believe it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
