Wings Over Scotland

Credit is due to those of the Scottish media who have taken up this site’s challenge to ask Labour the key question of the 2015 election debate in Scotland – “Are Labour prepared to form a government if they’re not the largest party in a hung parliament?”

(Because if the answer is yes then Labour’s entire Scottish election strategy – “Vote SNP get Tories!” – crumbles to dust, and if it’s no then Labour is saying that it’d be prepared to abandon not just Scotland but the whole UK to another five years of Conservative government purely out of spite against the SNP.)

Three of the party’s elected representatives have now been asked the question on air – James Kelly MSP by John Mackay of Scotland Tonight a week ago, branch office leader Jim Murphy by BBC Scotland’s Gary Robertson yesterday, and the shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran last night (below), again by STV’s John Mackay.

As you can see, Scotland’s voters still await an answer. But on this page we’ll keep track of all the swerves, evasions and dodges until we get one, if we ever do.

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Because we took a short break over the weekend, we sadly missed Labour’s solemn commemorations of the 1979 confidence vote, and as a result we don’t know whether anyone actually did don a black armband or lay a wreath to remember the miners that Labour didn’t support when they went on strike a few years later.

But an alert reader did find this for us.

It’s an extract from BBC reporter John Sergeant’s book “Maggie: Margaret Thatcher – Her Fatal Legacy” and you can read more of it below.

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We’re going to compile all of these onto a single page soon, because as you can see, Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop telling this lie.

Today’s expert saying “Does it, aye?” (and the latest in a long and distinguished line) is Peter Riddell from the Institute For Government, speaking on Radio 4’s “World At One” this afternoon (from 35m).

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From an editorial leader in this week’s London Evening Standard:

“The man likely to lead the SNP in Westminster, former party leader Alex Salmond, has made it clear that he is contemplating keeping a minority Labour government in power on a case by case basis. ‘If you hold the balance, then you hold the power,’ he said yesterday.

His price: an end to austerity and to Trident.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has come out fighting against the threat.“

Seems to sum it up pretty well.

As readers will know, when professional broadcast journalists can’t or won’t do their jobs properly, we’re not above jumping in ourselves.

So when someone tweeted to tell us that Jim Murphy had just started a phone-in on London station LBC, it seemed an ideal opportunity to quickly ring up and try directly asking him the question that Scottish Labour really, really don’t want to answer.

Here’s what happened.

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An alert reader pointed us to this edition of Newsnight we’d missed earlier this month, featuring the renowned Conservative Party chairman and liar Grant Shapps MP.

The population of the UK, according to the 2011 census, is 63,128,000. Shapps just told us he only cares about 11,200 of them (or 0.018%), because apparently those are all the votes the Tories need to turn round to secure an absolute majority in May’s general election. We very much doubt that any of the 23 target constituences he mentions, across which the required 11,200 votes are spread, are in Scotland.

And that, readers, is what the Tories (and, for that matter, Labour) really think of “the democratic will of the British people”. You may want to keep it in mind when you vote.

Because almost nobody in Westminster, whether they’re politicians or the media, ever pays any attention to anything outside SW1A, Alex Salmond’s comment in London yesterday that the SNP would vote against any Tory government in the event of a hung Parliament – which to any Scottish person was news as surprising as a weather forecast for rain – has been greeted with seemingly-genuine shock and horror.

Reporter after reporter has treated the non-revelations (which have been official SNP policy for as long as we can remember, and were stated explicitly by Nicola Sturgeon in November) as a stunning bolt from the blue, and Tory politicians and the right-wing media alike have burst into frothing, spluttering rage, based on the fact that apparently none of them grasps how either the UK electoral system or basic arithmetic work.

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We’re still not tired of these.

Although we can’t help thinking that maybe internal email is the more appropriate medium for resolving this particular workplace dispute.

We’ve had to illustrate this piece with a tweet from our old chum Duncan Hothersall, because at the time of writing the Scottish Labour account on Twitter has no mention of Labour’s “five point plan”, and nor does the branch office’s website.

And the reason for the absence of any more information is probably that the “plan” is another example of a Labour policy that looks like a tasty boiled egg until you crack its shell and discover that there’s nothing inside.

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Respect to John MacKay of STV, who on last night’s Scotland Tonight asked Labour MSP James Kelly the question this site has called for about whether Labour would stand aside and let the Tories rule if the latter were the largest party after May’s election, but Labour had enough seats to win a confidence vote and form the government with backing from the SNP and/or other parties.

Kelly, unsurprisingly, flapped and blustered and totally evaded it. But then we doubt he has the authority to make the tea in Scottish Labour, let alone speak for the party on key policy issues. If the question isn’t put repeatedly by all of the media to more senior Labour figures until an answer is produced, we’ll be wanting to know why.

Here’s Ed Miliband, giving a speech this morning to literally at least 20 Labour MPs, Labour MSPs, journalists and possibly a stray member of the public who accidentally walked through the wrong door in Clydebank, a place where Labour leaders used to address gatherings of thousands.

Unusually, Miliband took a few questions from the hacks, all of whom promptly wasted the opportunity by lobbing completely pointless softballs about coalitions and deals, all of which (a) have been asked a hundred times already, (b) were rendered moot by Alex Salmond on the Marr show yesterday, and (c) were only ever going to be batted away non-committally.

So here’s an actually worthwhile one they can ask instead next time.

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We have to give Jim Murphy credit – on this week’s Sunday Politics he started off with the subtle, misleading but technically-accurate version of Labour’s line about the “biggest party forming the government”, which involves making the true but irrelevant observation that in the past it’s usually been the case. (Mainly because UK elections almost always give the biggest party a comfortable majority.)

But it only took a couple of minutes of questioning for the Scottish branch manager to lose his cool and resort to the comprehensively debunked flat-out lie again.

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