Children’s author, billionaire and Labour donor JK Rowling, last year:
You feeling that popularity yet, readers?
Scotland on Sunday, 21 March this year:
And here’s the Guardian today.
We’re sure those miners Scottish Labour laid a wreath for a month ago will be chuffed.
Because we took a short break over the weekend, we sadly missed Labour’s solemn commemorations of the 1979 confidence vote, and as a result we don’t know whether anyone actually did don a black armband or lay a wreath to remember the miners that Labour didn’t support when they went on strike a few years later.
But an alert reader did find this for us.
It’s an extract from BBC reporter John Sergeant’s book “Maggie: Margaret Thatcher – Her Fatal Legacy” and you can read more of it below.
The Daily Record, five days before the independence referendum:
The Times, earlier this month:
Phew! Thank goodness for that No vote, eh readers?
The categorical support of Andy Murray for Scottish independence, though only finally unambiguously revealed in today’s Sunday Times (the tennis star’s day-of-poll tweet backing Yes could by a strict semantic interpretation have been said to be somewhat equivocal), isn’t much of a surprise.
So it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the media told us.
This week Scottish Labour quietly abandoned their “biggest party forms the government” election campaign after it was comprehensively debunked by this site and, belatedly, the mainstream media. An alert reader reminded us this evening of how the party wasn’t always so attached to the rules.
Because back in 2007, when Labour was neither the biggest party nor the incumbent administration, it had a damn good try at forming the government anyway.
Only a few diehards in the press are still clinging this morning to the Labour fiction we exposed yesterday, namely the flat-out empirical falsehood that “the biggest party gets to form a government” in the event of a hung Parliament.
The Daily Record’s hapless political editor Torcuil Crichton desperately fought against the proven facts on Good Morning Scotland as an incredulous Iain Macwhirter looked on, and a few of the party’s more unhinged supporters battle on on social media, but after some diligent battering away with evidence it looks like we’ve finally managed to get the message through to most of a reluctant media.
But why was it ever in doubt?
By now we imagine most readers have already seen the alleged leak of the Ashcroft polling results which aren’t due to be officially released until 11am today [EDIT 00.47am: out now], and which suggest some jaw-dropping SNP gains.
We’re not going to go off half-cocked until those have been confirmed, so instead here’s something sent in by an alert reader. It’s an extract from the autobiography of former Radio 1 DJ Liz Kershaw, and describes events around the funeral of Princess Diana. We think you’ll find it enlightening.
Kate Devlin of the Herald has been a political journalist as long as we can remember.
So it’s quite surprising that she’s apparently never heard of Gordon Brown before.
Ed Miliband, who is apparently the leader of the Labour Party, is in Scotland today to make some promises about his lifelong commitment to “Home Rule”, a policy which his MSPs were flatly denying ever mentioning earlier this month.
We’re sure he’ll be as good as his word.
In a post earlier today we quoted some extracts from the political memoirs of former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on the subject of the infamous 1979 vote of no confidence which resulted from his government overturning the Yes result of the Scottish devolution referendum that year, as a result of a Labour MP’s amendment to the bill which meant that it required an effectively impossible threshold for a Yes vote.
Callaghan said of the amendment:
He blamed the rebels on his own benches, rather than the SNP, for ultimately bringing about the collapse of his government and opening the door to the victory of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. And we’ve often wondered who they were.
We’ve spoken before of Scottish Labour’s most revered ancient totem of faith, the 1979 “stab in the back” myth by which they accuse the SNP of sole responsibility for the 18-year rule of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.
More than three-and-a-half decades later, Labour still cling to it as their trump card in any argument against the SNP, pulling it out when all else fails and relying on the fact that hardly anyone was there to contradict their version of events.
It’s an accusation that’s complete cobblers from top to bottom, but then again you’d expect us to say that. So instead let’s get the view of someone who was there.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
