With apologies to Jason Donovan, we felt we should probably have a look at the latest election leaflet Scottish Labour are putting through people’s doors.
We wouldn’t want voters to have too many broken hearts.
Below is a tweet made by Scottish Labour yesterday.
For the true version, keep reading.
We’ve been observing for some time now that Scottish Labour deputy “leader” Kezia Dugdale has something of a tendency for making claims with a pious, strident conviction that’s in directly inverse proportion to how true they are.
And as we DO like to get our facts straight before we run around asserting things, allow us to illustrate our point with a case study.
Yesterday we noted that nothing had yet been heard from Scottish Labour’s policy review into universal services, launched amid much hoopla in September 2012 off the back of Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech.
The party has spent much of its time since then attacking the SNP over social justice, claiming that universal benefits are a middle-class subsidy, hurting the poor by spending money on giving the well-off free stuff they could afford to pay for.
Professor Arthur Midwinter, the Labour-friendly academic the party hired to lead the review, was widely reported by the press vowing to “devote at least two days a week for up to two years to prepare a series of reports for the commission, which is being co-chaired by Labour MP Cathy Jamieson and finance spokesman Ken Macintosh”.
Those two years have come and gone, and nearly six months more, and there’s been no sign of a single report from the commission. And it turns out there never will be.
Another letter from the government. Sounds a lot like the others.
Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.
IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.
A number of readers last night sent us copies of the response to complaints they’d made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the Daily Record’s infamous “The Vow” front cover. We attach the full judgement at the bottom of this article, and as far as we’re concerned it’s fair and accurate. The Vow was a deliberate deception, but it didn’t break any rules – it merely relied on readers misinterpreting it.
The bit we’re still interested in is the paragraph above.
Still confused about the difference between an “oil fund” and a “resilience fund”, folks?
So were we, but no longer. We’ve had a breakthrough.
The letter below is extraordinary, readers. See if it fits with what you remember.
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.
There’s been much discussion in the press lately about Jim Murphy’s plan to change the elusive Scottish Labour “constitution”, a document almost nobody has ever seen and which most people didn’t know even existed until a few weeks ago.
Naturally we were curious to have a wee look, so when we stumbled across a page on the Electoral Commission website which said it held copies of party constitutions and provided them on request, we thought we’d take a shot on the off-chance. We weren’t at all surprised by the reply:
“the Commission does not hold a constitution for the Scottish Labour Party per se, since they are not separately registered with us. The Labour Party is registered for GB as a whole.”
But then an alert reader asked the EC a smarter question.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
