Wings Over Scotland

We missed this on Sunday, because it was 17 minutes into on the short-lived and unlamented “Crossfire” (now binned for a Sunday edition of “Good Morning Scotland”) and therefore pretty much everyone in Scotland missed it. It’s former Labour minister Helen Liddell, or as we should properly address her, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke.

We’ve spared you her subsequent painful bleating about a general election 35 years ago that she doesn’t seem to have quite gotten over, but we couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at her curious assessment of the referendum result, which we suspect fellow guest Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell was simply too stunned to react to.

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Libby Brooks in today’s Guardian:

“The recently elected leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy, faces a daunting challenge to lift his party’s fortunes before next May’s general election as a poll shows support for Labour in Scotland is now half of that for the SNP.

A Survation poll for Monday’s Daily Record, the first to be released since Murphy’s election on 13 December, found that 48% of Scottish voters plan to support the SNP in May, and 24% Labour.

The swing implied by the figures suggests that as many 10 Labour seats [sic] could fall to the SNP.”

But that’s not what the figures suggest at all.

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Political etiquette is a funny thing. Should some of the more vocal supporters of a Yes vote dare to express any degree of satisfaction at a couple of dozen journalists’ jobs being lost on a Unionist newspaper, social media is suddenly aflame with pious, angry lectures about the poor taste of rejoicing in others’ unemployment – regardless of whether it might perhaps have been caused by the paper’s own unethical actions.

But when tens of thousands of blameless oil workers face unemployment just before Christmas, it’s proving all but impossible for Unionists to keep a lid on their glee.

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An alert reader pointed us to the Labour “situations vacant” page:

Let’s do the sums on that.

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We remain perplexed, readers, by the apparent total lack of interest in the mainstream Scottish media about how many members the Scottish Labour “party” has.

Membership levels are a topical subject in the light of the extraordinary explosion in SNP and Green membership after the referendum, and with a general election just months away in which the make-up of Westminster’s 59-strong Scottish contingent could be crucial to the shape of UK politics for the next five years.

The number of members the main Unionist party north of the border can call on to knock doors and deliver leaflets will therefore be a very significant factor in the outcome. Yet on this morning’s Sunday Politics, when presented with an ideal and pertinent opportunity to question new Scottish “leader” Jim Murphy on the subject, Gordon Brewer didn’t even try to ask. What’s with that?

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One of our ever-alert agents uncovered this for us today. Published quietly last week by the House Of Commons Library and completely unremarked-upon by the Scottish media, it’s a document whose introductory text makes the relevant point concisely and eloquently without any need for elaboration or explanation on our part.

“The impact of removing Scottish MPs from the records of historic Commons divisions is also estimated. Of approximately 3,600 divisions to occur between 26th June 2001 and 26 September 2014, 22 (0.6%) would have concluded differently had the votes of Scottish MPs not been counted.

The note also compares, for each division since 2001, the lobby in which the majority of MPs per constituent country of the UK have voted to the lobby in which the majority of UK MPs voted.

In the current Parliament the lobby in which the majority of English MPs have voted has coincided with that of the majority of UK MPs for 99% of divisions. The majority of Scottish MPs has coincided with the majority of UK MPs for 24% of divisions; that of Welsh MPs for 26% of divisions.”

The emphasis is ours. England gets what England’s MPs vote for more than 99% of the time. Scotland gets what Scotland’s MPs vote for less than a quarter of the time. We’ll leave it at that.

The latest sales figures for newspapers in Scotland are out today, most of them showing the now-traditional hefty year-on-year declines. (The Scottish Daily Express was the biggest loser, shedding a hefty 14% of its readership in the last 12 months, with the Guardian, Daily Mirror and Daily Record close behind.)

What the stats throw into striking relief, though, is the pent-up demand for a Yes-supporting paper. Despite having been created in just three weeks on a shoestring budget and not being distributed by some of the biggest supermarket chains, The National – on the worst day so far recorded for its sales – would nevertheless crash straight into the chart in seventh place, already neck-and-neck with its 231-year-old sister paper The Herald and just a few thousand behind the Star and the Express.

The full ordered table is below.

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It’s still Jim Murphy Day here at Wings (did you all get nice presents?), but we’re as sick as you are of hearing him avoid questions about devolution, so instead we’re going to take a look at something else he said this afternoon.

“Mr Murphy said that, under his leadership, ‘Scottish Labour would introduce a 50% tax rate for people in Scotland earning more than £150,000 per year’.

‘We believe that those who can afford it should pay a little more. There are 16,000 people in Scotland earning more than £150,000 and increasing the highest rate of tax from 45% to 50% would raise around £250m.'”

£250 million? We’re sure it used to be rather less than that.

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Last night’s bizarre edition of Scotland 2014, in which the three Scottish Labour “leadership” candidates were quizzed by the daughter of a former Labour leader in front of an audience of the candidates’ own supporters (comprising MSPs, councillors and activists), saw all three stick doggedly to what’s clearly going to be the party’s main pitch in the 2015 general election – “Vote SNP, get Tories”.

It’s a line the party has trotted out at every election for decades, and which has been getting pumped out almost daily since Johann Lamont’s resignation – former deputy “leader” Anas Sarwar (who oddly declined to stand for the actual job when it became available) penned a column for the Evening Times on Monday, for example, entitled “Every vote for an SNP candidate is a vote to help elect David Cameron”, and he said the same thing in the Commons this very afternoon.

As alert readers will know, we like to check the facts on these things.

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…is the phrase that was making us chuckle this morning.

It headed an article of disingenuous carping so feeble that we can’t even be bothered archive-linking to it, entitled “Ten SNP Fails Since 2007”, because Margaret is bare down with the kids, innit? But we couldn’t help noticing one of the examples.

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As the Smith Commission continues its fundamentally pointless and impossible deliberations, in which it’s expected to digest and consider many thousands of submissions (including hundreds of detailed ones from political organisations and “civic Scotland”) in around three weeks, the Scottish and UK press is still casually and inaccurately tossing around the term “devo-max”.

There seem to be essentially two competing interpretations of the term – the previously-understood meaning (also known as “Full Fiscal Autonomy”) in which all powers are devolved to Holyrood except foreign affairs and defence, and a new one which simply refers to whatever devolution Westminster is prepared to grant. (Justified semantically by the claim that it’s the maximum devolution Scotland’s going to get.)

So when we commissioned our latest Panelbase poll, we decided that rather than the usual checklist of “which powers should be devolved”, to which the answers have remained the same for years, we’d ask some slightly different questions about the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, and the process of devolution itself, to see if we could determine what it is that the people of Scotland really want from their Parliament.

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When we commissioned our latest poll, the candidates for the Scottish Labour sort-of leadership hadn’t yet been finalised. In fact, we’re not even sure whether the post of deputy “leader” was up for grabs at that point, with Anas Sarwar having said that he had no intention of stepping down, shortly before stepping down.

But in any event we thought it’d be much more interesting to see who people actually thought should be the leader, rather than just who they regarded as the least-worst option out of whoever put their head above the parapet and took on the least attractive job prospect in Scottish politics.

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