Wings Over Scotland

Readers will probably recall that we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale’s recent claim on national TV that “50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read“.

It appeared on any possible interpretation to be complete nonsense, but Ms Dugdale – who’s pledged to make education the issue at the heart of her leadership – has been somewhat reluctant to clarify the statement.

Several queries from her Lothian constituents have gone unanswered, but one Wings viewer did manage to get a single tweet of response.

So let’s take a look at that link.

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Alert social-media users couldn’t have failed to notice Unionist activists and hacks working themselves up into a very great lather last night over (currently former) SNP MP Michelle Thomson. The ex-director of Business For Scotland has resigned the party whip and is now sitting, at least temporarily, as an independent while police conduct an investigation into some property purchases in which she was involved.

As yet no criminal activity by anyone has been alleged, and Police Scotland has said that it has no plans at the moment to even interview Ms Thomson, let alone arrest or charge her. As yet it’s a political non-story.

But the mere proximity of the member for Edinburgh West – previously the victim of a smear related to the Ashley Madison website hacking – to even a sniff of impropriety has triggered a paroxysm amongst the media and the beleagured opposition.

Amusingly, some senior journalists have even tweeted an accusatory blog written by Labour activist and regular BBC pundit Ian Smart, whose own membership of the Labour Party remains a subject of uncertainty after a series of abusive incidents – Scottish Labour have persistently refused to confirm whether he’s been expelled, despite having been “investigating” him since April.

But that’s not the most interesting piece of hypocrisy on show.

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Neil Kinnock, 1987:

Did voters come home to Labour? No.

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We know that the media isn’t normally shy about identifying which side of the Scottish independence debate people are on, especially if they’ve been behaving badly.

So we were a little puzzled by the papers this morning.

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Alert readers may recall that a few days ago we queried a dubious-sounding statistic from Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, who claimed that “50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read“.

We didn’t think that could be right, and dug up some figures suggesting that it was nonsense, but of course “the poorest kids” is a highly-flexible metric. Strictly speaking you could just mean the two poorest children in the country, and if one of those two can’t read there’s your 50%.

Luckily, we’ve now had some meat put on the bones of that claim.

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In the spirit of straight talking, honest politics, I’m going to put my cards on the table right now: I’m a Corbyn voter. As a classic hand-wringing, middle-class, North London leftie, the mad fact of Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy compelled me to register as a Labour supporter; empowered me to bet £3 on the foolish notion that Something More might somehow, suddenly, be achievable.

In no small part, I was inspired to do this by what happened in Scotland this year. I’m sure many of us were: finally, a viable political force south of Berwick was willing to show two fingers to austerity.

And if anyone called us out, if they told us we were crazy and that nobody would vote for such a “loony”, “radical”, “hard-left” candidate? Well, then we had a perfect example just north of the border to throw back at them. The SNP had hoovered up 50% of the vote on an anti-austerity ticket, and after all, aren’t we one nation? One people fighting for a common cause, et cetera? Couldn’t we put labels aside and work together?

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This is shadow Chancellor John McDonnell speaking to the Labour Party conference in Brighton just a few minutes ago (immediately prior to rather presumptuously inviting the Scottish electorate to “come home to Labour”):

We don’t recall those things happening. We feel sure that if they had, they would have been mentioned in the papers. Can any readers help us out?

Maybe check anything Kezia Dugdale tells you before you go on telly with it.

Let’s just quickly run through those facts, shall we?

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Given that he’s the last Labour MP left in Scotland, it’s perhaps just as well that Ian Murray is a quite interesting figure, because there’s going to be a lot of attention on him in the next five years.

Unlike the over-promoted, under-skilled, Buggins’-turn knife-and-fork-operators who’ve disgraced what were previously weigh-the-vote Labour constituencies in Scotland for decades, the member for Edinburgh South has some genuinely admirable qualities. As we noted before the election, he’s earned a reputation as a hard-working local MP: holding surgeries, replying diligently to letters and speaking up in the Commons.

He’s got a sense of humour about his lonely role, he’s the only Unionist politician ever to talk to Wings on the record, and on account of running a large tent at the Bath Festival most years he’s well known to several of our good friends in the city, who all speak highly of his personal character and work ethic.

So in all seriousness, we’re not without respect for the man. Which makes it all the more painful every time he opens his mouth.

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Ever since the SNP’s unexpected majority in 2011, there’s been a constant low-level whine of “one-party state” from various elements of the Unionist establishment. (The first example we could find from a quick Google search was Liberal Democrat buffoon Sir Malcolm Bruce in September of that year.)

It’s a curiously bitter and irrational way to refer to the outcome of democratic elections held under proportional representation, reflecting a worrying contempt for the views of voters, but after the SNP saw the benefits of First Past The Post in May 2015 (having spent decades being its victim), the angry bleating has become far more noticeable.

(The most recent politician to use the phrase was the Lib Dems’ current leader Tim Farron. Perhaps the party is engaging in displacement activity to distract itself from its craven abandonment in 2010 of its lifelong commitment to introduce PR, selling its principles cheaply for ministerial cars and a referendum on what Nick Clegg called the “miserable little compromise” of AV, which was then lost by a humiliating margin.)

But today someone really kicked it up a notch.

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The editor of the New Statesman just tweeted this image, trailing an interview with Jim Murphy, who alert readers may recall led Scottish Labour for a few months this year before its apocalyptic disaster of a general election campaign which saw it lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats it won in 2010:

Oh, wait – maybe he’s trying to claim the credit for it.

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Alert readers may recall an incident last year in which the Scottish media got itself very worked up about some independence supporters threatening to boycott holiday company Barrhead Travel after its owner sent a barking-mad letter to staff about how the company would go out of business if Scotland voted Yes.

The Telegraph, Express, Times, Daily Mail and Scotsman were among those covering the story at length – with the latter going so far as an extraordinary comparison to the Nazi atrocity of Kristallnacht – and someone called Jim Murphy opined that it was “a new low” and “the worst type of negative politics”, despite the SNP having discouraged and disassociated itself from any boycott.

So we’re sure that you won’t be able to move later today and tomorrow for newspaper articles about something similar, but significantly worse, that happened this weekend.

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