Wings Over Scotland

Impressive as it is in a party with Jackie Baillie in it, Kezia Dugdale has carved out quite a reputation in Scottish Labour as a specialist in making categorical statements of facts which turn out not to be true. So we were naturally sceptical when she claimed on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland that Stewart Hosie of the SNP hadn’t said whether a commitment to a second independence referendum would be in tomorrow’s SNP manifesto.

We thought that he had, and so did presenter Gordon Brewer, but Dugdale was most adamant – “I listened VERY carefully, very carefully indeed” –  that he’d “dodged and dived” on the matter, and spent more than a minute of her interview saying so.

So we went back and checked, because that’s what we do.

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Countless thousands of words – indeed, even an entire book – have been written by commentators and pundits right across the political spectrum about the long demise of the Labour Party in Scotland.

It remains to be seen whether the coming election will deliver the coup de grace that pollsters are predicting. Meanwhile, though, readers searching for an explanation but short on free time could do a lot worse than sit through this interview with the Scottish branch office deputy manager, Kezia Dugdale, from today’s Sunday Politics Scotland.

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The Sunday Times front page today reports (although in fact we can’t find the story anywhere on its website or in its iPad app) the 8,745th “intervention” by Gordon Brown in Scottish politics, the thing which is at least notionally still his actual day job.

We’re going to need someone to explain to us why even the punch-drunk inhabitants of Scottish Labour HQ could possibly imagine that to be a good idea.

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In the wake of the latest Ashcroft polls, the only line being deployed by Scottish Labour is that the projected outcome of an SNP landslide would be great news for the Conservatives and lead to David Cameron returning in triumph to Downing Street. One would presume, then, that the Tory press is delighted by the prospect.

So let’s check out some stories from today’s Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Mail.

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We know we’ve made this point several times before. But can someone explain to us again how there’s no significant difference between the (broad, collective) political outlook of the respective peoples of Scotland and England? Because if there isn’t, doing this kind of thing just doesn’t make any sense at all.

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“Scottish Labour” apparently launched its election “manifesto” somewhere in Scotland today. The “leader” of the fringe “party”, Jon Murnaghan or something, seemingly got a bit confused and made a number of pledges regarding devolved issues over which the Westminster government to be elected next month will have no control whatsoever, and would properly belong in a manifesto for the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

Mr Morley or whatever his name is, who – assuming he wins his own seat – will be an insignificant backbench MP in the event of Ed Miliband’s Labour party winning the election, also said a bunch of other stuff about the SNP being “bad” because they refused to tell him what would be in their 2016 manifesto, further supporting the idea that the agitated branch official had lost track of what year it was.

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…of a story in the Scottish Sun today is something rather important.

Those are the words of David Cameron as he launched the Scottish Tories’ manifesto in front of a heavily-vetted invited audience in Glasgow yesterday. They make the pages of a couple of other papers, including the Guardian (which hides them even further down the page than the Sun does), but it’s only the Herald that picks up on their significance, leading its article with the unequivocal lines:

“David Cameron has emphatically ruled out a deal with the SNP to deliver the Nationalists’ demand for full fiscal autonomy.”

And that’s weird, because it’s actually pretty big news.

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Last night’s juxtaposition of somewhat contradictory front covers on the Herald and Scottish Daily Mail was modestly amusing, but nothing new. We pointed out weeks ago that papers on both the left and the right were – often on the same days – painting the SNP as hand-in-glove allies of either Labour or the Tories according to whatever suited their own agendas, and nothing’s changed in that respect.

But it’s interesting to take a look behind the headlines of the respective stories and see the degree to which the truth can be bent, exaggerated or in some cases simply made up from thin air.

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How long do you think the papers can keep pretending that all the other papers don’t exist, or that we don’t see any of them, folks?

…hangs heavy about Scottish Labour. In an extraordinary piece on the STV website, the party today appeared to downgrade its bold assertion of just a few months ago that it could hold all 41 seats it won in Scotland in 2010, and perhaps win even more, to simply getting more than the SNP.

But the most remarkable thing happened at the end.

That, readers, is quite the admission. That’s a party which has utterly dominated UK politics in Scotland for six decades openly acknowledging that its entire campaign in the last three weeks will be based on railing against a complete fantasy.

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The Daily Record gets up high on its outrage horse this morning with a front-page story titled “Double-crossed on devo”, echoing Jim Murphy’s claim of yesterday that the Tories’ manifesto pledge on “English votes for English laws” is a “betrayal” of the “Vow” signed by the three UK party leaders before the independence referendum.

Unsurprisingly, the Record gives rather less prominence to the news that the Vow isn’t worth the fake parchment it wasn’t written on than it did to repeatedly hyping it up and then proclaiming that it had already been delivered.

But there’s a twist.

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