The election of Jim Murphy as branch office leader has so far failed to produce a shift in the party’s catastrophic polling figures north of the border, with most projections still suggesting that Labour’s Scottish seats will be reduced to single figures in May.
Last night we catalogued a series of its howlers since Murphy took over, culminating in a humiliating climbdown over some false claims about cancelled operations in the Scottish NHS. The party’s Scottish health spokeswoman Jenny Marra turned up on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the subject, and in doing so demonstrated exactly why Scottish voters are deserting it in hundreds of thousands.
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audio, comment, scottish politics, stupidity
The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.

Because those are flying about all over the place.
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comment, navel-gazing, scottish politics, stupidity
Being a journalist can occasionally present some tricky ethical dilemmas. Today’s Scotland on Sunday carries a story about Scottish Labour’s strife-riddled devolution plans, which attributes this quote to the Scottish branch manager Johann Lamont:
![Though in fairness, if you're doing your job properly you should really add a "[sic]" to the quote, or at least note in the next sentence that you presume she misspoke. johannreduce](https://i0.wp.com/wingsoverscotland.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/johannreduce.jpg?resize=460%2C78&ssl=1)
Now, that’s an awkward one for any conscientious reporter. We have to presume that the former English teacher MEANT to say “increase” (or “restore”), rather than “reduce”. But you can’t just casually reverse in print what someone actually said on the assumption that they meant the opposite, so the hapless Andrew Whitaker has to resort to the least-bad option, which is just printing it and hoping nobody notices.
It’s the rest of the article that contains the real nonsense, though.
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Tags: vote no get nothing
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, stupidity
This morning we’ve been double- and triple-checking our story from last night, because we were so sure we must have missed something. Even given the low esteem in which we hold the integrity of the hapless “Better Together” campaign, we felt that they surely couldn’t have made such an idiotic and fundamental error, and that instead we must have misinterpreted a word or a sentence somewhere along the way.

But no. We were wrong in that assumption. They really ARE that dim.
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analysis, idiots, scottish politics, stats, stupidity
Dear Yes Scotland,
Please immediately contact Channel 5 and ask them how much they want for this:
Pay any price they ask, and show it on September 17th. 100% Yes, in the bag.
(Download links 1 and 2.)
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apocalypse, audio, scottish politics, stupidity, video
Even as a supporter of independence with little interest in their wellbeing, sometimes you just can’t help slumping face-first onto your desk in sheer helpless despair at the spectacular idiocy of the Scottish Parliament’s clownish, dim-witted opposition parties. Scotland, to coin a phrase, deserves better.

Today’s demonstration appears, as it so often does, in the Telegraph.
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comment, scottish politics, stupidity
We were hoping to come up with a subtler headline than that, but trying to analyse today’s media in fine detail is a bit like trying to translate a complex scientific report from Mandarin into Latin, when it’s taped onto the front of a locomotive that’s hurtling directly towards you at 125mph and you’re standing on the track with a telescope.

There’s horror as far as the eye can see on this morning’s newsstands, but the most despicable and inexcusable is the atrocity of a front page disfiguring the Daily Record. The cover of “Scotland’s Champion” is crammed with falsehoods and idiocy from top to bottom, but that’s not the half of it.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, stupidity, uk politics
This week it was claimed by Stuart Adam, senior economic researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), that taxes would have to rise almost 14% in an independent Scotland, if they were the sole method used to fill the Scottish budget deficit.

It’s a dramatic headline, for sure. But is it an accurate reflection on the relative finances of an independent Scotland and one that remained part of the United Kingdom? As ever, you have to dig a little deeper to find out what’s really going on.
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Tags: Scott Minto
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analysis, scottish politics, stats, stupidity, uk politics
Particularly alert readers will have noticed that this site isn’t called Wings Over Wales. Which is a shame in one sense, because “WOW” would be a great acronym to have.

But we’re going to make an exception to our normally all-Scottish, all the time agenda today, because of something that happened in the smaller of mainland UK’s sub-states about which we happen to have some personal experience, and which ties in to Labour peer Lord George Robertson’s extraordinary assertion in a debate last month that Scotland has “no language or culture or any of that”.
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Tags: lizardsone nation
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comment, culture, stupidity, uk politics