Wings Over Scotland

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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The very few readers who don’t immediately just snort and turn the page when they see the words “George Foulkes” may have noticed in yesterday’s Herald that the thirsty peer could be found gloating gleefully that had Scotland voted for independence last September it would now be “bankrupt” due to the decline in oil prices.

We can’t be bothered pointing out for the 500th time that a Yes vote wouldn’t have seen Scotland actually independent until March 2016, and that the oil price NOW is therefore about as relevant to anything as, well, Baron Foulkes himself.

But we couldn’t help noticing a couple of small arithmetical details.

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It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

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Even we can’t quite believe this one, readers.

Good grief, where do we even start?

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There’s currently a fake “petition” on the Labour website.

Ostensibly it’s gathering signatures representing opposition to the bedroom tax, but in fact its only purpose is to harvest email addresses so that Labour can then bombard unwitting recipients with dodgy, untruthful solicitations for cash. (What would actually be the point of a petition about the bedroom tax at this stage?)

That’s not the terrible thing about it, though.

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The media is aflame today with the claim that Jim Murphy has finally ended weeks of speculation about whether he’ll stand again for his current Westminster seat of East Renfrewshire in the general election. Numerous sources including STV, the BBC, the Scotsman and Murphy’s local press have all announced unequivocally that the MP has confirmed his candidacy.

The only slight hitch is that he’s done absolutely no such thing.

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We’re a bit surprised The Sun managed to get an issue out at all today, to be honest. The editorial team must have been struggling to see through their tears of laughter after they managed to get two days of free publicity in every rival newspaper in the country and a ton of coverage from national broadcasters over a completely imaginary decision to stop featuring topless models on Page 3.

And they must have almost wept with the hilarity of getting The Guardian to line up a whole collection of its most pompous feminists to prematurely proclaim victory and parade some gloating triumphalism across several pages, before putting a winking Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth front and centre this morning and innocently pointing out that they’d never actually said anything so why was everyone acting so surprised?

Now, of course, every rival paper in the land will spend ANOTHER day or two talking about the sting, and The Sun will continue to roll on the floor and clutch its sides and get away with printing stuff like this:

And the thing is, nobody who looks like an idiot today will learn the lesson.

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It is sometimes said, unkindly, that in parts of Scotland it would be possible to get a monkey elected as a Labour MP, so long as said monkey was wearing a red rosette.

Here, not entirely unrelatedly, is Brian Donohoe (Central Ayrshire), earlier today.

Um, just a couple of points.

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Honestly, they should put ribbons and a bow on this stuff.

Alert readers will know that we very often like to bring to your attention both Scottish Labour’s fondness for radically rewriting history and its frequent struggles with basic counting. Today, though, the North British branch office has spectacularly outdone itself and managed to pull off both at once. This is going to be hard to beat.

Above is an extract from the official record of today’s proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. And we can only applaud Rhoda Grant’s ambition.

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Ever since the referendum, we’ve documented the various ways in which Unionists have constantly tried to rewrite history and inflate the magnitude of their victory.

We had Alistair Darling saying before the vote that 60-40 would have been too close for comfort, but then his team attempting to portray 55-45 as a resounding win, and we had the Labour peer Baroness Liddell try to claim the real result was 67-33 based on a near-Stalinist approach to voter attribution.

And yesterday, bless his heart, No campaign mascot Wee Willie Rennie had a go.

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