Wings Over Scotland

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 Way back in May this year we sent one regarding the infamous unpublished opinion poll, and got a response the following month.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.

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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.

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The Independent, 10 November 2014:

“Ed Miliband tried to persuade Gordon Brown to stand for the leadership of Scottish Labour, according to a senior party source.

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George Osborne on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sometimes, readers, analysis is simply unnecessary, because the news speaks for itself. We’re not just saying that because it’s a lovely sunny day outside in unseasonal t-shirt temperatures, either, because it’s difficult to think of what needs to be added to a polling result saying that – far from being sick of the whole issue after three years of constitutional debate – a three-to-two majority of Scots would welcome a second independence referendum within just FIVE years, and a two-to-one majority would be happy to have one within a decade.

When you add in the findings of a completely different poll which revealed that were the referendum tomorrow Scotland would vote Yes by 52-48 (a huge 7% swing in as many weeks), it doesn’t take much in the way of professional insight to deduce the mood of the nation, particularly in the context of pro-independence parties having trebled their membership while the hollowed-out shell of Scottish Labour implodes and a panicking media tries frantically to anoint Jim Murphy – Jim Murphy – as its saviour.

So we’re off to the park for a bit.

It’s been impossible to know where to start today. Last night hundreds of angry protestors picketed a £200-a-seat banquet in Glasgow at which Scottish Labour “showcase[d] the party in front of donors and business figures” in a desperate bid to raise cash for the branch office (which survives on handouts from the UK party), and at which deputy leader Anas Sarwar, less than 48 hours after vowing he’d remain in his position, announced that he’d step down after all.

Despite being the deputy, Sarwar wasn’t stepping down to contest the leadership, but rather to smooth the path of Jim Murphy. Murphy is London’s preferred candidate, but even Labour aren’t dim enough to want to run Holyrood with London-based MPs in BOTH of the leadership roles, so Sarwar pulled a swift U-turn to offer a potential “dream ticket” of Murphy and Kezia Dugdale, a Lothians list MSP who this week told the Edinburgh Evening News that she intends to leave politics within 10 years.

(Then again, in 2011 Jim Murphy told Labour List he wouldn’t consider running for Scottish leader for “maybe 20 years” and he’s only waited three, so who knows?)

But there’s so much more going on.

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