Wings Over Scotland

The general election 2015 has rounded the last bend and is heading down the final straight, with no clear winner in sight. Four days from now the UK electorate will go to the polls and deliver, if the numbers are to be believed, an unholy mess. Only one part of the country seems to know with clarity what it wants, and that’s “not Labour”.

The North British branch of the party has in truth been a political Easter egg for years – big and impressive-looking on the outside, but entirely hollow within – and this year it looks like the voters are finally going to shatter the shell and leave nothing but a small heap of fragments revealing just how little chocolate was ever there.

And the realisation has sent Labour completely out of its mind.

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Scottish Labour’s chief of staff in February:

The same man tonight:

Does the biggest party form the government or doesn’t it, John?

At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour deputy leader Kezia Dugdale launched into an ill-advised attack over an SNP candidate who’d made some foolish (but not especially outrageous) comments on Twitter in 2012. Rather than simply issuing the standard generic condemnation of abusive remarks, Nicola Sturgeon did so but also drew Dugdale’s attention to the beam in her own eye.

Labour activist, blogger, lawyer and regular BBC pundit Ian Smart (he hasn’t been seen on STV since accusing them repeatedly, without any evidence, of letting the SNP pre-approve all interview questions some time ago) is well known to readers of this blog. Bizarrely, however, Dugdale feigned ignorance of his activity.

To help her, we’ve compiled some of Mr Smart’s greatest hits.

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Sometimes it’s hard to find the words, readers.

Where do you even start when grown adults will say something that dim?

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That slacker Chris Cairns is on holiday again, readers. But don’t worry, we’ve still got some chucklesome weekend funnies for you.

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…after this, then there’s always this:

Aneurin Bevan’s heart would have swelled with pride.

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Scotland on Sunday on Labour’s latest Scottish election strategy:

We’re not making that up. Go and check for yourself. And when you’ve prised your jaw off the floor, acquaint yourself with the truth, as told by Jim Callaghan himself.

Because this is an actual thing that’s happening.

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Before we start, let’s make this plain: we will NOT be submitting any sort of complaint to any healthcare body regarding what we’re about to discuss, and we ask readers not to either. When push comes to shove, we don’t want nurses losing their jobs.

We just wish Scottish Labour felt the same way.

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We’re starting to think that we could save ourselves an awful lot of trouble by only posting every other day. Obviously that’d reduce the workload in numerical terms, but also we could avoid the impossible task of having to keep track of Scottish Labour’s endless litany of U-turns, flip-flops and reverse ferrets on policy, which as far as we can make out appear to switch 180 degrees on alternating days.

Whichever one we picked we’d end up with positions that were at least consistent, and not have to try to make sense of which of two totally conflicting viewpoints the party was professing to hold according to whether the date was odd or even.

As it stands, we have to deal with this sort of thing.

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There’s been considerable mirth in nationalist circles ever since Jim Murphy became leader of the Scottish Labour branch office late last year. Announcing that he wanted to “reach out” to Yes voters, his idea of an olive branch was to hire three of the most divisive and obnoxious figures to be found anywhere in his party’s entire hinterland, in a move about as conciliatory and unifying as when Rangers signed Mo Johnston.

Counter-intuitively, the link-up with Blair McDougall (who headed Murphy’s successful leadership bid) is the one that makes the most sense. After all, as “Better Together” campaign director McDougall was responsible for turning a 30-point lead for No into a 10-point one, so he clearly knows something about how to appeal to Yes people.

But for a man widely cited as smart and savvy, Murphy also staffing his office with comically unpleasant Twitter troll John McTernan and the nutter-fringe imbecile Susan Dalgety – someone who was last seen resigning in disgrace after likening the SNP to the Omagh bombers – was harder to understand.

And the non-stop trainwreck that has followed leaves only one explanation.

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We’re feeling a bit stupid right now, readers. Earlier on today we sarcastically dubbed Scottish Labour “geniuses” over their plans to reintroduce alcohol (and sectarian singing) back to Scottish football at exactly the point when Scotland seemed to have finally turned the corner in its dysfunctional relationship with alcohol.

And this week vile cybernats had also been enjoying mocking a pair of hapless Labour members who’d posed outside a Fife health centre bemoaning the “clear” shortage of staffing, when in fact it had no staff at all, because it was an old closed-down facility, located right next to a brand shiny new £6m one built by the Scottish Government.

Indeed, for days now Labour have been carrying out a two-pronged stunt-photocall strategy, touring the country standing outside hospital casualty departments looking concerned about an almost entirely imaginary “A&E crisis”, while also leafleting every major football ground promising to let fans get smashed at games again.

Seeking a cheap laugh, we tweeted that we hoped they didn’t get confused and start handing out their “MOAR BOOZE!” literature outside the A&E wards, but then an alert reader pointed out that we were idiots and Jim Murphy was in fact an evil mastermind.

And they were right.

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