Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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The letter below is extraordinary, readers. See if it fits with what you remember.

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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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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.

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In a post earlier today we quoted some extracts from the political memoirs of former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on the subject of the infamous 1979 vote of no confidence which resulted from his government overturning the Yes result of the Scottish devolution referendum that year, as a result of a Labour MP’s amendment to the bill which meant that it required an effectively impossible threshold for a Yes vote.

Callaghan said of the amendment:

“This provision was carried by a majority of fifteen, with as many as thirty-four Labour Members voting against the Government. I have since wondered whether those thirty-four Labour Members would have voted as they did if they had been able to foresee that their votes on that evening would precipitate a General Election in 1979, at the least favourable time for their Government.”

He blamed the rebels on his own benches, rather than the SNP, for ultimately bringing about the collapse of his government and opening the door to the victory of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. And we’ve often wondered who they were.

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We’ve spoken before of Scottish Labour’s most revered ancient totem of faith, the 1979 “stab in the back” myth by which they accuse the SNP of sole responsibility for the 18-year rule of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.

More than three-and-a-half decades later, Labour still cling to it as their trump card in any argument against the SNP, pulling it out when all else fails and relying on the fact that hardly anyone was there to contradict their version of events.

It’s an accusation that’s complete cobblers from top to bottom, but then again you’d expect us to say that. So instead let’s get the view of someone who was there.

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We’re exhausted this morning, readers, and it’s not from a lack of sleep. It’s because we’ve been trying to definitively establish what Scottish Labour’s position with regard to the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system is, on the day the entire UK-wide Labour party (with so far one known honourable exception in the form of Katy Clark MP) looks set to boycott a Westminster debate on it, and it’s a time-consuming and tiring job.

In fairness, we can’t really say that we blame the Scottish branch office, especially, for ducking out, because we suspect they haven’t got any more of a clue what their position is than we do, and if you’ve got to stand up in your country’s Parliamentary chamber – which of course for them is the House Of Commons – and make a speech about it, that’s a significant handicap.

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…is eternal vigilance, chums. Turn your back on Unionists and the media – for the sake of argument we’ll say that’s two things – for a second and they’ll start trying to slip lies out into the public consciousness, from which place they’re notoriously hard to dislodge. (Kim Jong-Un’s mythical Scottish restaurant is a recent case in point. It’s now a comedy staple, despite having been completely fabricated.)

So it’s always worth keeping a close eye on this site’s dear old pal, Labour candidacy hopeful and media favourite Duncan Hothersall, for an early sight of which falsehoods the party will be trying to propagate next.

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An unsurprising result.

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We’re still supposed to be on a skeleton service for the festive period, but we couldn’t just let this one slide. The cashflow problems at the Labour Party must be more severe than previously thought, because the entire organisation seems to be sharing a single email account. We got yet another begging letter today, from the same address previously named as “Iain McNicol” and “Ed Miliband”, but today’s one was credited to shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero.

Alert readers will recognise the appeal as one we’ve been watching for 11 days now. It’s an attempt by the UK party to raise some cash to employ 10 campaign assistants specifically for Scottish Labour. The jobs are still openly listed as such on the Labour website’s situations-vacant page. Yet the party seems oddly reluctant to say so.

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