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.
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.
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.
From today’s Telegraph:
Actual number of children belonging to Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell: 0.
You literally can’t make this stuff up.
With polls almost all predicting a hung parliament at next year’s UK general election, every seat counts. So the beleaguered Labour Party must have had hopes of securing a constituency like Gordon in Aberdeenshire.
The Lib Dem incumbent Malcolm Bruce is stepping down, almost certainly taking his substantial personal vote with him, and the party’s choice of replacement, ex-BBC journalist Christine Jardine, managed to pull in just 1,940 votes in neighbouring Aberdeen Donside when she stood there for the Scottish Parliament last year.
In 2010 Labour came third in the seat, but just 1,016 votes behind the SNP, and with Scots traditionally inclined to back Labour at Westminster elections Gordon would surely have had to be down as a winnable target for Ed Miliband.
So the Labour candidate selected to contest the seat – before Alex Salmond had declared an intent to stand, making the Nats hot favourites – is quite an eye-opener.
Social media has been alive in recent days with No voters concocting a fiendish plan to vote tactically against the SNP at next year’s general election. Labour supporters are urging people to vote Conservative rather than let the SNP take any new seats which might be used to secure a better devolution settlement for Scotland.
We’re not sure the Nats have too much to worry about.
A real letter sent out by the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland this week.
Someone do us a favour and explain to her in language she’ll understand that as the Scottish Parliament isn’t trusted by her Westminster pals to control its own resources, the price of oil doesn’t actually impact on “the SNP’s economic plan” in any way whatsoever, would you? We’re not very good with crayons.
We’ve been watching in some bafflement the continuation of this bizarre non-story from yesterday. (For which, incidentally, the P&J has published a correction today.)
As one in five Scottish children live in poverty and temperatures fall at the beginning of winter with many families facing the choice between heating their homes or buying food, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie apparently arrived at the conclusion that the most important thing he could be doing with his taxpayer-funded time was occupying the Scottish Parliament with a demand to know (for no immediately apparent reason) how often civil servants had accessed Wings Over Scotland in the six months leading up to the referendum.
Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves on Sunday Politics.
Did you spot what she got wrong, readers?
There’s a glorious piece in today’s Daily Mail from BritNat arch-troll Simon Heffer, in which he fumes and splutters about the outrageous idea of finding himself, thanks to the huge surge in support for the SNP since the referendum, ruled next year by a government “that only a small minority in England would have voted for”.
We’re sure that Scots everywhere will empathise with the unfortunate Mr Heffer’s intolerable plight, having many decades of experience of that very scenario. We’d also be interested to know, however, if he sent a submission to the Smith Commission detailing his radical solution to the whole devolution issue, as outlined in the Mail on 6 September this year:
We very much hope that he did.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
