Wings Over Scotland

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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This:

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Alert readers will know that we like to keep you updated on the progress of our Freedom Of Information requests. Way back in May this year we sent one regarding the infamous unpublished opinion poll, and got a response the following month.

We weren’t very happy with it, though, and we followed it up. And today, just six months after the initial request, we got a final reply.

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George Osborne on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning:

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Disappointingly, we haven’t received a reply from Daily Record editor Murray Foote to our email yesterday inquiring into the provenance of “The Vow”.

However, an alert reader who wrote to him yesterday did. You can read it below.

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We thought you might be interested to see some of the working of this post from yesterday. Of the 2.4m votes cast in Scotland in the 2010 UK general election, not far short of a million – if a recent YouGov poll is to be believed – are currently likely to be cast for different parties in 2015. And it’s intriguing to see where they’ll go.

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To his credit, Ed Miliband seems to have noticed that his party is crumbling beneath his feet. The rot is spreading down from Scotland, and Labour’s vote in Rochester & Strood – a seat it held, with slightly different boundaries, as recently as 2010 – has plummeted to just 16% despite voters in the constituency naming the NHS (usually Labour’s strongest field) as their top priority.

And when modern-day Labour panics, it reaches for a little hammer and smashes the glass on a box marked “IN CASE OF ABSOLUTE EMERGENCY TRY SOCIALISM”, in which it keeps a very old, moth-eaten piece of paper titled “House of Lords reform”.

So today Miliband suddenly pulled what seems to be a brand-new box-fresh policy out of – well, let’s be polite and say “the ether”.

The Lords is to be abolished, we’re told, and replaced with a new elected “Senate”, which will conveniently also serve as some  form of regional devolution, though its specific responsibilities and powers have – readers will doubtless be quite astonished to hear – not been laid out.

Mr Miliband’s only problem will be getting anyone to believe it.

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If not a surprising one.

Scottish Labour now has a leadership contest, with the (relatively) left-wing MSP Neil Findlay throwing his hat into the ring with that of colleague Sarah Boyack (assuming both can secure the necessary 10 nominations from M/S/EPs).

We thought we’d help him tidy up his press statement on the matter, as he appears to have accidentally left a few words out.

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This is how it begins. This morning’s media reports a call from First Minister-elect Nicola Sturgeon that any future referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU should be subject to a veto from all four constituent nations – that is, if the UK as a whole votes to leave but either England, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales vote to stay in, the result is null and void.

It’s an extremely clever move. While none of the main three Westminster parties actually WANT to leave the EU and would love to go along with such a plan, public opinion in England will not allow any of them to back it. There would be a massive outcry, and quite legitimately so – Scotland, people would reasonably say, just voted that it wanted to remain part of the UK, and therefore must accept UK decisions.

And with that, the die is cast and the door opens.

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