Wings Over Scotland

There’s been much discussion in the press lately about Jim Murphy’s plan to change the elusive Scottish Labour “constitution”, a document almost nobody has ever seen and which most people didn’t know even existed until a few weeks ago.

Naturally we were curious to have a wee look, so when we stumbled across a page on the Electoral Commission website which said it held copies of party constitutions and provided them on request, we thought we’d take a shot on the off-chance. We weren’t at all surprised by the reply:

“the Commission does not hold a constitution for the Scottish Labour Party per se, since they are not separately registered with us. The Labour Party is registered for GB as a whole.”

But then an alert reader asked the EC a smarter question.

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Let’s start with the obvious: nobody has a clue who’s going to win the 2015 general election. But almost without exception, commentators are saying that should Labour’s vote collapse in Scotland to the extent that current polling says it will, it will radically alter Ed Miliband’s chances of kicking David Cameron out of 10 Downing Street.

That’s a message that Labour are delighted to hear, because their entire Scottish electoral strategy/manifesto is the phrase “If you vote SNP the Tories will get back in”. Now, we already know that on the empirical level that’s complete cobblers – the Tories historically get in when the SNP vote is lowest.

But it could be fairly argued that those statistics are correlation rather than causation, isolated as they are from the rest of the UK’s results. So we decided to take a more detailed look at some of the possible scenarios from this May’s vote and see if the Nats really could let the Tories in.

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We’re pretty sure the Daily Record is just trolling us on purpose at this point.

Wait, Labour pushed for a what now?

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The kerfuffle on social media right now over some votes on fracking in the House of Commons tonight would probably dislodge a fair amount of gas trapped in rock by itself. Claim and counter-claim are zinging around furiously, but we eventually found a factual précis that even idiots like us could understand. Buckle up.

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It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.

Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.

But readers might be wise to be sceptical.

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Jim Murphy had an uncomfortable few minutes on Sunday Politics this morning (though in fairness, not quite as uncomfortable as those Natalie Bennett of the Greens had just endured as Andrew Neil shone some light on some of the more out-there sections of the party’s manifesto).

Murphy did his best to waffle and stall for time as he avoided almost all of Neil’s questions. He had no opinion on whether Nicola Sturgeon should take part in election debate, no view on whether Labour would work with the SNP in the event of a hung Parliament, and refused point-blank to clarify his own position in terms of standing for his current Westminster seat this May.

(Even though the BBC had told us he’d cleared that up three days ago.)

He did make one unequivocal statement, though.

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Official poster from the Tories:

Official leaflet from Labour:

So if Scots vote SNP in May, both Ed Miliband and David Cameron will get in. Glad we cleared that up. We might start work on some sort of handy translation chart (“vote Green get Ulster Unionist”; “vote UKIP get Monster Raving Loony”), so if you spot any more do drop us a line.

Actually, that last one’s true, isn’t it?

Tonight’s Question Time for some reason featured a question about the SNP, which Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and UKIP representatives got to discuss at length with nobody from the SNP (or even from Scotland) there to respond. It was an enlightening insight into England’s attitude to the Scots as a whole, not just the SNP. Here’s how it went.

We recommend all of it, but UKIP’s Paul Nuttall is the star, from 3m 42s.

The media is aflame today with the claim that Jim Murphy has finally ended weeks of speculation about whether he’ll stand again for his current Westminster seat of East Renfrewshire in the general election. Numerous sources including STV, the BBC, the Scotsman and Murphy’s local press have all announced unequivocally that the MP has confirmed his candidacy.

The only slight hitch is that he’s done absolutely no such thing.

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The No camp really do seem to be the world’s worst winners. In a mischievous piece of trolling today, the First Minister announced that the SNP’s policy of not voting on English matters at Westminster was to come to an end, and that it would intervene for the protection of the NHS, on the reasonable grounds of avoiding Barnett cuts to the Scottish budget were privatisation south of the border to lead to lower spending.

The reaction from Labour and the Tories was predictable, with the latter accusing Sturgeon of throwing principle “out the window”. George Osborne, furthermore, was quoted in the Telegraph telling a Commons committee that:

“I think it would be very unfair to the whole United Kingdom if we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was beholden on Scottish Nationalist votes in the next Parliament.”

And readers might be forgiven for thinking “Hang on, isn’t that what you wanted?”

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