Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers may recall that since the election of Jim Murphy as Scottish Labour branch office manager he’s barely gone a moment without promising to “reach out” to Yes voters. Last month he even pledged that he’d employ some in his team if he won the Labour job.

We imagine they’ll be fair hammering on his door after the latest addition to his crew, because today’s Herald reveals that Murphy’s new chief of staff, and joining “Better Together” director Blair McDougall among Jim’s backroom boys, is to be our old pal John “there will be no referendum” McTernan.

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It is, we’ve remarked before, often difficult to satirise Scottish Labour, because it’s hard to think of anything more fatuous, transparently hypocritical or just plain idiotic than the things they actually say for real. The party’s recent demand that the Scottish Government should set up a “resilience fund” to cushion the blow of falls in oil prices – or as everyone else on Earth usually calls it, an “oil fund” – is only the latest example.

There are just five months between the two tweets above. Yet Labour seemingly believes that the Scottish public will already have completely forgotten that the party spent most of the last two years telling Scots an oil fund was a mad, impossible idea.

But it’s even more ludicrous than it sounds.

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It’s always tricky coming back to the office after the holidays. You get a bit ring-rusty and it can take a few days before you’re firing on all cylinders again.

So we’re going to be charitable and assume that lack of match fitness was the cause of Scottish Labour’s astonishing multi-track trainwreck yesterday.

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From today’s Telegraph:

Actual number of children belonging to Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell: 0.

You literally can’t make this stuff up.

We had to extend our festive semi-break for a day to deal with some administrative matters, readers, but it’s just as well, because the thing that happened today would have defied our best attempts at either analysis or satire.

That’s a real thing we didn’t make up. Saints preserve us.

Labour 2014:

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If twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then these five recent pictures of “Saint” Jim Murphy – the martyr who endured an egging for all our sins – from the print media surely tell us something interesting.

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Scottish Labour clearly get a pretty good deal from the printers’ shop that makes the giant pound coins, because they’re waving them around again.

The North British branch office’s latest wizard jape is to upset all the people who they urged to join for £5 just last month – never mind the gullible saps forking out nine times that much – by offering cut-price memberships at £1 a year.

It’s what the retail trade calls a “loss leader” – in effect the party will be paying people to join, because £1 won’t come anywhere near to covering the cost of processing each new member, sending them a membership card and so on.

But it did give us an idea.

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The chief opponents of UK electoral reform are the Labour and Conservative parties, who by an astonishing coincidence are also the two parties who benefit by far the most from the undemocratic stitch-up that is First Past The Post, by which more than half of the votes cast in Britain result in no Parliamentary representation whatsoever.

The excuse they normally use to justify a system by which one of them will usually get a large absolute majority on barely over one-third of the votes cast is that FPTP produces “strong” governments, where “strong” is defined to mean “no possibility of the opposition, which speaks for two-thirds of the population, ever defeating the ruling party in a vote”.

The AV referendum was taken as a ringing endorsement of this principle, although in practice it offered just a bafflingly complicated and even less attractive version of the status quo. But a remarkable poll in Scotland this weekend (with detail published in today’s The National) shows that on one side of the border at least, FPTP has completely lost the support of the electorate.

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Several papers lead this morning with a Panelbase poll showing that a sizeable majority of Scots – regardless of their party allegiances – think that electing a large number of SNP MPs at next May’s UK general election will be the only practical way to safeguard Scotland’s interests in the wake of the referendum No vote.

This poll, currently live on the YouGov website, shows why:

The problem that will arise if most Scottish Labour MPs keep their seats in 2015 will be that there is only one Labour Party and it has only one leader.

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We’re still supposed to be on a skeleton service for the festive period, but we couldn’t just let this one slide. The cashflow problems at the Labour Party must be more severe than previously thought, because the entire organisation seems to be sharing a single email account. We got yet another begging letter today, from the same address previously named as “Iain McNicol” and “Ed Miliband”, but today’s one was credited to shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero.

Alert readers will recognise the appeal as one we’ve been watching for 11 days now. It’s an attempt by the UK party to raise some cash to employ 10 campaign assistants specifically for Scottish Labour. The jobs are still openly listed as such on the Labour website’s situations-vacant page. Yet the party seems oddly reluctant to say so.

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