Lord Digby Jones, formerly head of the famously politically neutral CBI, on the SNP.
We’re going to have to check what the CBI’s position on electoral reform was before First Past The Post threatened to elect a load of SNP MPs and became a democratic outrage in the process. We’ll get back to you on that one.
A new Wings Over Scotland exclusive, coming to you every Wednesday at noon.
You lucky, lucky people.
Alert readers were startled yesterday when a former UK Prime Minister who WASN’T Gordon Brown suddenly took it upon himself to lumber out of his crypt and unleash an unsolicited intervention in the general election campaign.
As apparently that’s now the requirement for anyone attempting to influence a vote in Britain, we’re sure Sir John – a man best remembered in the world of politics for cheating on his wife with one of his ministers and instituting the Cones Hotline – will remind us which constituency he’s standing for any minute now.
If you thought the right-wing press was having paroxysms at the weekend, readers, you’re going to love what they had lined up for the day of the SNP manifesto launch.
Let’s have a little tour of the London newsrooms, shall we?
A variant on the story below appears in most of the right-wing press today.
That’s the Daily Mail version, which is the most detailed. The Express’s reporting was similar. But in order to manufacture a grievance on behalf of UKIP and the Tories, every paper which covers the story is required to torture the data beyond all reason.
In the wake of the latest Ashcroft polls, the only line being deployed by Scottish Labour is that the projected outcome of an SNP landslide would be great news for the Conservatives and lead to David Cameron returning in triumph to Downing Street. One would presume, then, that the Tory press is delighted by the prospect.
So let’s check out some stories from today’s Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Mail.
We know we’ve made this point several times before. But can someone explain to us again how there’s no significant difference between the (broad, collective) political outlook of the respective peoples of Scotland and England? Because if there isn’t, doing this kind of thing just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Careful now.
(Polls here.)
…of a story in the Scottish Sun today is something rather important.
Those are the words of David Cameron as he launched the Scottish Tories’ manifesto in front of a heavily-vetted invited audience in Glasgow yesterday. They make the pages of a couple of other papers, including the Guardian (which hides them even further down the page than the Sun does), but it’s only the Herald that picks up on their significance, leading its article with the unequivocal lines:
And that’s weird, because it’s actually pretty big news.
So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?
Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
