We’ve just had a fascinating email from Scottish Labour forwarded to us, from a concerned reader who’d written to them to ask if Labour would really refuse to form a government if they weren’t the largest party. The answer might not be the one anyone who’s seen the party’s election literature (below) would be expecting.
Alert readers will have to decide for themselves whether bravado or sheer desperation is to blame, but Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop themselves from lying to the people of Scotland about the formation of the next government.
Mindbogglingly, the party has just released a video in which Jim Murphy repeats the lie again, and in today’s Daily Record its Ayrshire candidate Sandra Osborne openly admits that “We are talking to people on the doorstep explaining that whoever ends up the biggest party after the election will form the next government”, despite it having been proved beyond the tiniest shred of dispute that that’s simply not true.
Fortunately, reinforcements have arrived.
The last few days have not been proud ones for the Scottish media. Following the Daily Record’s humiliation at the hands of the independent press standards body over the Smith Commission, we don’t see this letter from the chair of the Scottish Prison Officers Association in today’s Scotsman (and the article in question doesn’t appear to have been corrected), so it looks like we’re going to have to print it here.
Jim Murphy in today’s Sunday Mail:
But hang on a minute. What bedroom tax?
The Independent Press Standards Organisation has delivered its verdict on the Daily Record’s coverage of the Smith Commission recommendations on 27 November 2014, after we lodged a complaint with the watchdog body.
We attach its findings below. (Emphases ours.)
All this year we’ve been noticing a curious re-writing of history in the Scottish and UK media. It’s spanned left-wing and right-wing press, and even Yes-friendly voices like Iain Macwhirter and the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier have been sucked in.
Yet it’s such a fundamentally bizarre misunderstanding of a political system that’s now been running in Scotland for 16 years that we’re bewildered at the way everyone’s suddenly decided that it happened.
The latest occurrence of this odd phenomenon was in yesterday’s Daily Record, and the subject is the newly-alleged “informal deal” between the minority SNP government of 2007-11 and the Scottish Conservatives.
It’s still Jim Murphy Day here at Wings (did you all get nice presents?), but we’re as sick as you are of hearing him avoid questions about devolution, so instead we’re going to take a look at something else he said this afternoon.
£250 million? We’re sure it used to be rather less than that.
The Daily Record today outlines what it’s pushing hard as a triumphant intervention from Gordon Brown which justifies a No vote in the referendum. (It also claims the credit, comically suggesting its Monday front page drove Brown’s announcement.)
It lists “12 new powers” in Brown’s plan. Let’s take a look.
We thought this deserved a wider audience after the Herald’s appalling front-page lead scare story today by Michael Settle and Kate Devlin, channelling Jim Murphy MP:
“SCOTTISH POLICE FEDERATION
5 Woodside Place, Glasgow, G3 7QFTo: News Editor
Date: 1 September 2014
Subject: Independence Referendum
Oooft. ‘Nuff said.
The key exchange on currency from last night’s debate:
At the end of the clip, a flustered Darling finally blurts out what the No camp have been trying not to admit for the entire campaign: “Of course we could use the pound”.
Unionists and journalists are now frantically spinning that they’d never denied such a thing. But we know that’s not true, and nobody got left with more egg on their face than Mr Darling’s supposed superior, Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont.
We’ve been so busy with the Wee Blue Book for the past week or so that we only just got round to listening to last Tuesday’s interview with Alistair Darling on Good Morning Scotland in time, before it vanished from the iPlayer. The former Chancellor gets a quite uncomfortable ride from presenter Gary Robertson, and flaps angrily for much of the ten-and-a-half minutes trying to turn every question into one on currency.
Mr Darling also makes some startlingly and empirically false statements throughout the interview, and we thought it’d be worth noting a few of them and seeing if they crop up on tonight’s BBC1 debate with the First Minister.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
