Wings Over Scotland

An alert reader today drew our attention to a detail we’d missed in a recent article in the Shetland News. It concerned Alistair Carmichael’s leaking of a false memo in order to smear Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP while the Orkney & Shetland MP was still Secretary of State for Scotland, and took the form of a quote from Carmichael’s Holyrood counterpart Tavish Scott, MSP for Shetland:

Two questions immediately leap to mind.

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We know that politicians are allowed to lie in election literature, but we’re struggling to see how this isn’t fraud, which is something different altogether.

Click the image to see both letters full-size.

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Today’s Scottish Sun has a full breakdown of all 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, including bookies’ odds for the favourite in each one. It suggests that nine Labour MPs will have jobs in Scotland a week from today, along with two Tories and a single lonely Lib Dem, with the SNP sweeping the other 47.

We ran the incumbents in those 12 seats through MP Report Card, an independent site which tracks the activity of all the UK’s MPs including expenses claims, outside earnings, how often they turn up to vote or speak in debates and how good they are at replying to constituents’ letters, to gauge their calibre.

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Scottish Labour branch office manager Jim Murphy will be appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Call Kaye” programme from 9am today, taking questions from voters as well as presenter Kaye Adams. The phone number to ring in is 0500 92 95 00.

Below are a few posers readers might like to put to Mr Murphy, because he seems to have been adept at avoiding them throughout the campaign. Feel free to reword them.

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There’s a tactical voting tool on the Telegraph website, which despite a somewhat loaded headline purports to even-handedly advise confused voters on the best course of action to take in their own constituency depending on whether they want to keep Ed Miliband or David Cameron OUT of 10 Downing Street.

We were a bit suspicious when we typed our Bath postcode in and asked to keep Cameron out, because it advised us to vote Labour even though it’s one of the safest Lib Dem seats in the country (with the Tories in 2nd) and Labour got just 3,251 votes in 2010, which is to say they’ve got absolutely no hope here.

And then we tried some Scottish seats, and things got a bit creepy.

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A few days ago, a constituency poll by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft found that the SNP were leading narrowly in Edinburgh South – a seat in which they secured a paltry 7.7% of the vote in the 2010 general election. Keep that fact in mind, readers.

Today the Edinburgh Evening News (EEN) published an article by David Maddox, a senior political journalist on the Scotsman, alleging that the SNP candidate for the seat, Neil Hay, had “liken[ed] anti-independence campaigners to Nazi collaborators” in a tweet over two and a half years ago (from a pseudonymous account under the name “Paco McSheepie”), and had also tweeted a series of attacks on pensioners.

Scottish Labour immediately leapt on the article and demanded Mr Hay be sacked as the candidate, less than two weeks before the election. It’s not possible to replace a candidate at such a late stage – some voters may already have voted by post – and such a move would thereby effectively have handed the seat to the Labour candidate and previous MP Ian Murray by default.

The story turned out to be an absurd, massive exaggeration and misrepresentation of the reality. But it also exposed a level of naked, shameless dishonesty and hypocrisy in Scottish Labour, and in particular its deputy leader Kezia Dugdale, that even this site hadn’t previously dared to imagine.

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Earlier today we highlighted some of the social-media charm of Labour blogger and BBC pundit Ian Smart, after the Scottish branch office deputy leader Kezia Dugdale demanded that the First Minister should take a more pro-active role in policing the comments of party members on Twitter and Facebook.

Mr Smart’s history of incredibly abusive and offensive comments stretches back many years. But of course, it wouldn’t be reasonable to berate Scottish Labour for its failure to act if it wasn’t aware of them. So we had a trawl through his Twitter followers list just to see if there was anyone who might have noticed and brought it to the leadership’s attention so they could have a quiet word.

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After literally months of telling voters endlessly that the only way to stop the Tories forming the next government was for Labour to be the biggest party, Jim Murphy was finally pressed properly last night on the question by the First Minister on STV (from around 1h 40m). Here’s what happened:

That seems to be a pretty clear and unequivocal statement – Labour will vote against any Queen’s Speech from the Tories. We already know that the SNP have pledged categorically that they’d do the same.

What that means is that if the SNP and Labour between them – in ANY combination – have more than 323 MPs, the speech will be defeated and the Tories can’t form the government, whether they’re the biggest single party or not.

At that point, Ed Miliband will be invited to attempt to form one, which the SNP will vote for, and which on the numbers above will mean that Miliband becomes the next Prime Minister. Labour, though not the largest party, will form the government.

That’s from Jim Murphy’s own mouth. The lie is dead. Anyone still got any questions?

Like some sort of out-of-control, unstoppable lying machine, Scottish Labour keep telling the electorate that the party with the most seats in a hung parliament is the one that forms the government, and that the only way to prevent the Conservatives from returning to power is for Labour to be the biggest party.

They’ve been saying it for weeks. They say it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, almost as if it’s all they’ve got.

The trouble is that an awful lot of people seem to disagree with them.

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Credit is due to those of the Scottish media who have taken up this site’s challenge to ask Labour the key question of the 2015 election debate in Scotland – “Are Labour prepared to form a government if they’re not the largest party in a hung parliament?”

(Because if the answer is yes then Labour’s entire Scottish election strategy – “Vote SNP get Tories!” – crumbles to dust, and if it’s no then Labour is saying that it’d be prepared to abandon not just Scotland but the whole UK to another five years of Conservative government purely out of spite against the SNP.)

Three of the party’s elected representatives have now been asked the question on air – James Kelly MSP by John Mackay of Scotland Tonight a week ago, branch office leader Jim Murphy by BBC Scotland’s Gary Robertson yesterday, and the shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran last night (below), again by STV’s John Mackay.

As you can see, Scotland’s voters still await an answer. But on this page we’ll keep track of all the swerves, evasions and dodges until we get one, if we ever do.

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As readers will know, when professional broadcast journalists can’t or won’t do their jobs properly, we’re not above jumping in ourselves.

So when someone tweeted to tell us that Jim Murphy had just started a phone-in on London station LBC, it seemed an ideal opportunity to quickly ring up and try directly asking him the question that Scottish Labour really, really don’t want to answer.

Here’s what happened.

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We’ve just had a fascinating email from Scottish Labour forwarded to us, from a concerned reader who’d written to them to ask if Labour would really refuse to form a government if they weren’t the largest party. The answer might not be the one anyone who’s seen the party’s election literature (below) would be expecting.

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