Wings Over Scotland

Right. We’ve got some slightly bad news, readers, and we might as well bite the bullet and tell you now. It’s touch and go whether Project Red is going to arrive before the election. (The good news is that going by the polls it isn’t going to matter.) Our vast team of coders is still working on it around the clock, but it’s looking like a tall order.

So we better tell you why.

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If you’re trying to give someone an example of a terrible group of people from history, I think the Nazis are pretty good for that purpose. They fulfil the criterion excellently, what with all the invading and occupying and repression and genocidal murder and everything, and there’s very little ambiguity or any shades of grey about their evil.

Now, alert readers may have spotted that while the headline of this article is a genuine quote from the paragraph above, and could be technically correctly described as my words by someone with malicious and dishonest intent (something which does in fact happen regularly), it gives a highly misleading impression of what was really said.

And with that, welcome to the Scottish media.

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Normally you have to wait until after an election for this stuff.

But Scottish Labour’s promises are collapsing one by one with 10 days still to go.

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There’s a fascinating detail in the latest Panelbase/Sunday Times survey of Scottish public opinion, which shows a further 2.5% swing to the SNP compared to the same company’s last poll earlier this month.

Those are some remarkable figures, but they tell a much wider story.

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Scotland on Sunday, 21 March this year:

“Ed Miliband will go on the offensive against the SNP on a visit to Scotland tomorrow as Labour prepares to unveil a dossier of evidence to show that Nationalist MPs supported the Tories 70 per cent of the time during the last two Labour governments.

Discussions are also underway to commemorate the 28 March anniversary of 11 SNP MPs joining the Tories to help vote down Jim Callaghan’s government in 1979.

The historic vote led to the election which brought in Margaret Thatcher and heralded 17 years of Conservative rule. Proposals to mark the day include wearing a black arm band and laying a wreath at the miners’ memorial.”

And here’s the Guardian today.

“Lord Heseltine, the former Tory deputy prime minister who championed the regeneration of Britain’s inner cities in the 1980s, is being lined up by the shadow business secretary to advise Labour in government.

In a sign of how some Labour figures will try to revive the ‘big tent’ approach of Tony Blair, Chuka Umunna described Heseltine as a visionary who could advise him on plans for the further devolution of power to the English cities and regions.

‘There is no denying it, a lot of people in the Labour movement are quite inspired by what he’s done in rejuvenating cities and regions,’ he told the Guardian. ‘Just because he is a Tory should not stand in the way of us working with him in the future and I very much hope to do that.'”

We’re sure those miners Scottish Labour laid a wreath for a month ago will be chuffed.

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And we’ll say it again.

Remember this, readers?

Turns out it wasn’t THAT kind of “fact”. You know, the true kind.

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You might not think it, readers, but even after all this time we’re still capable of a certain degree of innocent, naive trust in Scottish journalism.

When Nicola Sturgeon didn’t just issue a boilerplate condemnation at FMQs yesterday after ludicrously overblown allegations of Twitter “trolling” by an SNP candidate, but went on the counter-attack over Labour’s grotesquely abusive Ian Smart, we foolishly thought that might make both sides of the story newsworthy.

And then we opened the papers.

We don’t expect the media to be impartial. But let there today officially be an end to even the slightest pretence that it’s at least fair, professional and honest.

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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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At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour deputy leader Kezia Dugdale launched into an ill-advised attack over an SNP candidate who’d made some foolish (but not especially outrageous) comments on Twitter in 2012. Rather than simply issuing the standard generic condemnation of abusive remarks, Nicola Sturgeon did so but also drew Dugdale’s attention to the beam in her own eye.

Labour activist, blogger, lawyer and regular BBC pundit Ian Smart (he hasn’t been seen on STV since accusing them repeatedly, without any evidence, of letting the SNP pre-approve all interview questions some time ago) is well known to readers of this blog. Bizarrely, however, Dugdale feigned ignorance of his activity.

To help her, we’ve compiled some of Mr Smart’s greatest hits.

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