Wings Over Scotland

So there’s this, which isn’t the biggest surprise.

Having already told the people of Scotland to get stuffed and forget about having any sort of voice in government if they wouldn’t vote for Labour, there’s no major shock in Miliband doing the same to those in Wales.

But alert readers may have noticed that there’s one more Celtic nation in the UK that hasn’t been mentioned yet. What’s the Labour position there?

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The Daily Mirror’s “Ampp3d” offshoot used to be a fantastic resource for statistical debunking, and sometimes still is. But ever since it’s been officially absorbed into the Mirror, it’s been increasingly deployed as a Labour spin tool.

Today it tries to juggle numbers to excuse Gordon Brown’s bargain-basement sale of the UK’s gold reserves in 1999 – a subject that was raised by an audience member on last night’s Question Time special and which we now know with certainty cost the country a whopping $19bn (or £12.5bn at current exchange rates).

“The Tories want you to believe that selling the gold in 1999 cost the taxpayer many billions of pounds. Here’s how his fantasy maths works:

Selling the gold at an average price of $277/oz made the government a total of $3.5 billion. With gold prices peaking at $1,780.65 the government could have made as much as $22.5 billion. But anyone who says they can predict the price of anything 12 years in the future is completely bonkers.”

We’ve added the emphasis on that last sentence. And it’s a fair enough point broadly speaking, although of course with the gold sell-off we’re looking back with the benefit of hindsight about what actually did happen, not trying to guess, so calling it “fantasy maths” is somewhat inaccurate, given that it’s exactly the opposite of a fantasy.

The trouble is that Ampp3d isn’t always so dismissive of predicting the future.

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You’re probably going to see this misreported in the press quite a lot tomorrow. We thought we should get the whole thing up for the record, to avoid confusion.

We were as stunned as everyone else for a moment. On the Question Time special earlier tonight, Ed Miliband appeared to state that he’d rather not form a government (ie he’d let the Tories in) than do so with the support of the SNP. It sounded like he’d gone dramatically further than he’d ever gone before.

And then he realised what he’d done, and panicked.

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Remember that lovely British solidarity you were told by Labour to vote No for?

You probably need to read this, folks.

It’s come awfully late, but we’ve finally got an answer to a question people have been asking Jim Murphy since last December.

In an interview with the BBC’s Gary Robertson this morning, the Scottish Labour regional manager told listeners that should he win the East Renfrewshire seat in next month’s election, he’d stay in the job for the full five-year term, but would also stand for election as a Holyrood MSP in 2016.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 29 April 2015)
.

And that raises more questions than it answers.

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A little surprise bonus toon for you, readers.

It’s from an exhibition at the Leiper Fine Art Gallery in West George Street in Glasgow (a firm friend of the Yes movement), featuring political artwork by Wings cartoonists Chris Cairns – creator of the pic above – and Greg Moodie, along with many others, of which you can buy originals to enhance your home.

It runs until 11 May, so you should probably pop along if you’re in the vicinity. We’re not saying we’ll definitely stab you if you don’t, but why take unnecessary risks?

There’s a tactical voting tool on the Telegraph website, which despite a somewhat loaded headline purports to even-handedly advise confused voters on the best course of action to take in their own constituency depending on whether they want to keep Ed Miliband or David Cameron OUT of 10 Downing Street.

We were a bit suspicious when we typed our Bath postcode in and asked to keep Cameron out, because it advised us to vote Labour even though it’s one of the safest Lib Dem seats in the country (with the Tories in 2nd) and Labour got just 3,251 votes in 2010, which is to say they’ve got absolutely no hope here.

And then we tried some Scottish seats, and things got a bit creepy.

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Firstly, we’re not sure this qualifies as “BREAKING” news:

But it’s not the Daily Record’s cub reporter that we’re talking about.

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The Daily Mail evidently decided the first headline wasn’t mad enough.

First and second versions here.

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We’re sure we’re not the only people for whom the hours are dragging and we wish the election would just hurry up and get here, but all the same we’re pretty sure that if there were 11 days left to save the UK on Sunday morning, then by Tuesday morning there should be fewer than 10 still to go.

Saturday:

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