Wings Over Scotland

Our collection of toe-curling Johann Lamont interviews from Labour’s party-conference weekend wouldn’t be complete without the longest one, in which the BBC’s Brian Taylor proves that while he might be a toothless pussycat as an analyst, he takes no prisoners as an interviewer.

It’s been impossible to avoid a negative tone in the last few days, readers, because the Scottish Labour conference is like a dark storm-cloud of hatred, raining grimy, toxic lies and hypocrisy into the political landscape, and the print media wallowed around in the evil, sucking glaur it produced until everything was thick with concealing mud that plugged the yawning holes in the party’s promises.

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“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

It’s one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema. I’ve heard it a hundred times. And lately, to me, it’s a pretty fair summation of everything that’s gone wrong in Scottish Labour’s relationship with both its own members and its voters.

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Earlier this week we noticed the curious lack of media coverage of the “Devo Nano” report. As the document spelling out Labour’s “more powers” offer to Scotland in the event of a No vote, its release was ostensibly the most important milestone so far in the independence debate, so we found it very strange to see it get such a muted reception, particularly from the Daily Record.

Two days later the explanation arrived, in the form of the so-called “Red Paper”. Described by some journalists as a “mini-manifesto”, it was a 64-page uncosted wishlist of vague feelgood notions like reducing child poverty. (A brave, daring and controversial step there to be sure.) And this time the papers were all over it.

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We think this picture makes further comment unnecessary.

The last 40 years of UK politics accurately summarised in 30 seconds.

(From episode 3 of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, still on iPlayer at time of writing.)

Rob Shorthouse is the Head of Communications for “Better Together”. This week he took part in a debate in Dunoon. The paper’s account of the event, published today, is fascinating and unusually candid, but this bit stood out for us in particular.

We think that’s his coded way of saying he’ll be voting Yes. Would explain a lot.

An extraordinary front-page headline in today’s Herald blares “Miliband pledges positive case for Union as No inject love into debate”. (We apologise to any readers we may have just inadvertently upset with the thought of Ed Miliband “injecting love” into them while they’re still digesting their breakfast.)

The article’s rather shy on details of Ed’s positive case, but luckily the Guardian has it.

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Yesterday, as the full (lack of) magnitude of Labour’s feeble devolution proposals became apparent, we wondered how they’d go down with the Union’s supporters in the media. We’d been detecting a certain anxiety over the last few weeks, a feeling that those in the press who back a seriously beefed-up settlement were uncomfortable with what it was becoming increasingly clear was going to be delivered.

So we were genuinely unsure which way the newspapers would leap. Would they flog Devo Nano for all it was worth, hyping it to the heavens as the only thing they had to go with, or would some be so dismayed at Labour’s quivering, lettuce-limp absence of ambition that they’d turn on the party in disgust?

The truth was somewhere in between.

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Every time today that we’ve re-watched Johann Lamont’s multi-vehicular pile-up of an interview on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, we’ve seen something new in it that we missed previously and which makes us pull this face:

So (hngh) we’re going to have to get these down for posterity.

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We just had to put this up before packing in for the evening.

“Labour has also rejected proposals to devolve air passenger duty (APD), alcohol, fuel and tobacco duties, corporation tax and capital gains tax, to avoid tax competition with the rest of the UK and to avoid appealing to business interests.

Senior sources said the decision to reject devolving APD was also influenced by the loud applause from BA boss Willie Walsh and Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary for Salmond’s policy of phasing out APD after independence.”

Read that over to yourselves a few times, folks. Let it seep right in. Labour refused to devolve APD, a policy their own Devo Commission’s interim report had recommended, because it was an SNP policy that some major Scottish employers approved of.

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Nothing to do with Devo Nano, just something spotted by an alert reader that we don’t recall being picked up anywhere in the press. And it seems, you know, interesting.

“The ‘Yes’ side sought to turn the table on their opponents over Europe by arguing that the potential 2017 [EU] referendum, which Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged  to hold if he can’t negotiate better terms for the UK, creates more uncertainty than a Yes vote.

But in one of the most eye-catching statements of the evening, [Alistair] Carmichael said, to gasps of surprise among the audience:

‘There is no question of there being a referendum. There is no mechanism for the Conservatives to deliver a referendum 2017. That is the hard political fact.’“

Shouldn’t that really be “ear-catching”? But we can’t help wondering whether Mr Carmichael has explained this rather pertinent fact to his cabinet colleagues or not. With the EU elections coming up, it might be something they’d want to know.

[NOTE: The content of this article will be added to Part 1 after today for easy future reference. This one will be left here so that comments will be preserved. Comment on either this post or the earlier one as you see fit.]

Let’s proactively synergise some more inter-operational solutions!

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