On the day Jim Murphy stands down as leader of the Labour Party North Britain branch office, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer our humble, heartfelt tribute to both him and the insightful political commentariat of Scotland.
Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:
The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.
Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.
(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)
A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.
We’ve already noted that today is a confusing news day. But when we were listening to the radio this morning we thought we maybe hadn’t woken up properly.
The segment concerned a report by the Tory-leaning think tank Reform Scotland, and saw both the organisation and Labour MSP Hugh Henry trying doggedly to find a bad spin on the news in the fact that crime in Scotland is at a 40-year low. So desperate were they to do so that they ended up denying the existence of arithmetic.
An update for those interested, via an alert cartoonist:
From: Garreth.Lodge
To: Christopher Cairns
Subject: RE: Ian Smart
Date: 9 June 2015 14:25:33 BST
Dear Christopher,
Thank you for your e-mail to Kezia with regards to her exchange with the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 23rd April 2015.
Kezia can confirm that the person mentioned in the exchange has had their membership of the Labour Party put under administrative suspension and an investigation is currently being conducted by the General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party.
If you have specific questions on the investigation you will need to direct them to the Scottish Labour Party, not Kezia’s Parliamentary office.
If there is anything other issues Kezia can help with as your MSP, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Kind Regards
Garreth
We’ve already brought you the First Minister’s appearance on last night’s The Daily Show in the US, but in addition to the seven minutes that were shown on TV there were a further seven minutes of interview which didn’t go out on air, but were shown on the Comedy Central website, region-blocked so only US residents could see them.
When the FM goes abroad to represent Scotland in the outside world, though, we think it’s only fair that Scots get to see what she’s saying and doing on their behalf, so we didn’t let such trifling obstacles get in our way.
The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.
Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.
The likely next Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on today’s Sunday Politics:
We’ll try to keep this brief, because we want to go to the seaside.
The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.
There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).
We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
