Wings Over Scotland

When we tweeted a link to this Morning Star story about Scottish Labour chief of staff John McTernan speaking for the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference last September, several readers found it quite difficult to believe.

After all, this was a senior Scottish Labour figure telling delegates that “It’s a good thing [Margaret Thatcher] did what she did” to the UK economy, and that “There’s a far wider range of assets that are currently owned by the government which I would privatise”, among other not-terribly-socialist views. It seemed implausible.

Fortunately, we can now bring you the proof. It’s very much worth a watch.

We’re sure Scottish Labour’s few remaining voters have no cause for alarm, though. We’re almost positive that there’s no significance in the fact that McTernan was pretty much the first person Jim Murphy rushed to hire when he became leader, just a few weeks after McTernan had given the Tories advice on winning elections.

After all, just because you’re in charge of all of a party’s staff doesn’t mean that you get to exert any kind of influence over its policy [SUB PLEASE CHECK].

Jim Murphy’s practiced air of nonchalant bonhomie was coming apart at the seams all over today’s “Good Morning Scotland” (from 2h 10m). Pressed hard by presenter Bill Whiteford, the beleaguered Scottish Labour branch manager spluttered and blustered and interrupted constantly in a desperate attempt to stop Whiteford from even finishing any questions, never mind getting answers to them.

Murphy tried determinedly and repeatedly to punt the hopelessly-discredited line about the biggest party forming the government, on the sole basis that it had always been the case before, seemingly unaware that the election wasn’t being held in the past. He even tried to use the recent catastrophic Ashcroft polls to Labour’s advantage.

You can marvel at the entire nine-minute trainwreck by clicking the link below. But let’s just pull out that one argument and take a closer look at it.

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Seemingly oblivious to the mockery of voters, the Labour and Tory sides of the media are today doggedly continuing with their quest to convince the electorate that voting for the SNP will let both the Tories and Labour in.

In the latest in a long series of hilarious diatribes from the right-wing English press, today’s Daily Mail (English edition only, natch) carries a mad rant from Max Hastings about “the SNP’s almost Stalinist agenda” imposing a nightmarish “socialist paradise” on the people of England via Ed Miliband and “Nicola Sturgeon, red in tooth and claw”.

Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical Daily Record has an editorial leader – unbylined but with Torcuil Crichton’s stubby, inky fingerprints all over it – desperately screaming the official Scottish Labour line that the Nats are closet Tories, “the arrival of dozens of SNP MPs in Westminster would make a Conservative government more likely”, and that “without Labour, no one else will be able to stop Tory attacks on the poor”.

(It seems to have entirely escaped Crichton’s attention that Scotland voting Labour, including in 2010, has utterly failed to stop Tory attacks on the poor for decades.)

So now we know – voting SNP will bring about a socialist, Stalinist paradise of Tory governments attacking the poor. Glad we cleared that one up.

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Below is a tweet made by Scottish Labour yesterday.

For the true version, keep reading.

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In modern Scotland, you’ll struggle to find a politician from any party who won’t agree with two propositions: that Scotland is a nation and that devolution has, on balance, been a positive experience.

Debates about Scottish nationality are rare these days too. A substantial majority of Scots define themselves as “Scottish only”. Even UKIP has quietly ditched its plan to abolish Holyrood and now talks of forming a government.

But for all this consensus, Scotland’s inability to fully represent itself on the airwaves and onscreen remains one of the most critical issues we must now face up to.

The referendum created an eclectic range of alternative media. But, whether we like them or not, large media institutions like the BBC maintain a reach both online and offline that only a very select number of new platforms can begin to rival.

No single project can address this problem. Only a systematic renewal of Scotland’s media landscape will change the current reality of managed decline.

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We’ve been observing for some time now that Scottish Labour deputy “leader” Kezia Dugdale has something of a tendency for making claims with a pious, strident conviction that’s in directly inverse proportion to how true they are.

And as we DO like to get our facts straight before we run around asserting things, allow us to illustrate our point with a case study.

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The Daily Record is currently faithfully blaring out Labour’s anti-SNP “NHS in crisis” message, as part of the embattled party’s bizarre strategy of fighting a Westminster election solely on policies that are devolved to Holyrood, like health and education.

But an article on its website today dredges new depths even for the Record.

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Yesterday we noted that nothing had yet been heard from Scottish Labour’s policy review into universal services, launched amid much hoopla in September 2012 off the back of Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech.

The party has spent much of its time since then attacking the SNP over social justice, claiming that universal benefits are a middle-class subsidy, hurting the poor by spending money on giving the well-off free stuff they could afford to pay for.

Professor Arthur Midwinter, the Labour-friendly academic the party hired to lead the review, was widely reported by the press vowing to “devote at least two days a week for up to two years to prepare a series of reports for the commission, which is being co-chaired by Labour MP Cathy Jamieson and finance spokesman Ken Macintosh”.

Those two years have come and gone, and nearly six months more, and there’s been no sign of a single report from the commission. And it turns out there never will be.

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We love it when the UK government tries to get down with the kids.

The Smiths broke up in 1987.

The Scottish media’s daily MurphyGram this morning (which is dutifully reported by the Scotsman, Herald, Courier and doubtless more) is that a vote for Labour in next year’s Holyrood election won’t mean a return to tuition fees for university students.

We’re not absolutely sure why a Holyrood election pledge is news just weeks out from a Westminster one, but we’ll let that slide, because we’re more interested – as ever – in what the reports DON’T say.

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Scottish Labour’s mustard-keen Kezia “Deputy” Dugdale bravely tried a tweet all on her own on Friday without running it past Labour central office in London first.

It didn’t go too well.

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The categorical support of Andy Murray for Scottish independence, though only finally unambiguously revealed in today’s Sunday Times (the tennis star’s day-of-poll tweet backing Yes could by a strict semantic interpretation have been said to be somewhat equivocal), isn’t much of a surprise.

So it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the media told us.

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