Wings Over Scotland

This morning we noted the weird double standards of the media when it comes to reporting politics-related violence (and/or the absence thereof) in Scotland. We weren’t expecting such a good illustration of it to come along within two hours.

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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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As far as we know, this is the final major set-piece interview that Jim Murphy will have to give before the general election.

As Sally Magnusson of Reporting Scotland makes an admirably dogged but ultimately unsuccessful effort to get a straight answer on just about anything out of Labour’s regional branch manager, we’d swear it was possible to actually measure the delirium of relief on his face as the end draws near and the desperate evasion is over forever.

We gather that for the next week Scottish Labour are just bringing in boardgames.

A few days ago, a constituency poll by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft found that the SNP were leading narrowly in Edinburgh South – a seat in which they secured a paltry 7.7% of the vote in the 2010 general election. Keep that fact in mind, readers.

Today the Edinburgh Evening News (EEN) published an article by David Maddox, a senior political journalist on the Scotsman, alleging that the SNP candidate for the seat, Neil Hay, had “liken[ed] anti-independence campaigners to Nazi collaborators” in a tweet over two and a half years ago (from a pseudonymous account under the name “Paco McSheepie”), and had also tweeted a series of attacks on pensioners.

Scottish Labour immediately leapt on the article and demanded Mr Hay be sacked as the candidate, less than two weeks before the election. It’s not possible to replace a candidate at such a late stage – some voters may already have voted by post – and such a move would thereby effectively have handed the seat to the Labour candidate and previous MP Ian Murray by default.

The story turned out to be an absurd, massive exaggeration and misrepresentation of the reality. But it also exposed a level of naked, shameless dishonesty and hypocrisy in Scottish Labour, and in particular its deputy leader Kezia Dugdale, that even this site hadn’t previously dared to imagine.

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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.

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A new Wings Over Scotland exclusive, coming to you every Wednesday at noon.

You lucky, lucky people.

The splendid video below is a short clip from one of a Scottish Labour “campaign rally” held on Saturday morning. (And we do mean Saturday morning – the gathering seen in the distance at the very beginning as Murphy walks up through a deserted Buchanan Street appear to be waiting outside the Sainsbury’s Local, which opens at 7am.)

One can only admire Anas Sarwar’s upbeat view of his audience. But from the broader perspective, readers might be forgiven for wondering what on Earth was going on.

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Impressive as it is in a party with Jackie Baillie in it, Kezia Dugdale has carved out quite a reputation in Scottish Labour as a specialist in making categorical statements of facts which turn out not to be true. So we were naturally sceptical when she claimed on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland that Stewart Hosie of the SNP hadn’t said whether a commitment to a second independence referendum would be in tomorrow’s SNP manifesto.

We thought that he had, and so did presenter Gordon Brewer, but Dugdale was most adamant – “I listened VERY carefully, very carefully indeed” –  that he’d “dodged and dived” on the matter, and spent more than a minute of her interview saying so.

So we went back and checked, because that’s what we do.

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Sorry about this, readers. We know that YOU already know that the biggest party in a hung parliament has no special privileges when it comes to forming the government, but since those truth-dodging scamps Scottish Labour still won’t stop saying it (see below), we do still need to keep collating the evidence proving it’s a lie.

The bald-eagle-looking chap toting the cerise tie in this clip of this morning’s Victoria Derbyshire show on the BBC News channel is Lord (Andrew) Adonis, a former Labour government minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He also wrote the book “Five Days In May” about the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, despite having won almost 50 fewer seats than the Conservatives in that election. So he understands the process.

Lord Adonis does, in fairness, make a brief and half-hearted attempt at punting Jim Murphy’s “1924” line, but in the end he’s forced to concede (nudged along by Peter Riddell of the Institute for Government) that in fact the second-placed party forming the government is perfectly possible.

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You’d have to say this seems pretty clear.

(From today’s Daily Politics, around 28m in.)

With there only having been three hours of the Scottish political party leaders (and Jim Murphy) debating on TV so far this week, and four days to wait for another one, BBC Scotland thought they might need another 40 minutes on this afternoon’s Sunday Politics Scotland to discuss the issues around the forthcoming general election.

It went well, but for busy readers in a hurry we’ve edited the show down to a compact nine-minute cut, which still gets across everything the full version did.

A great example of adult discourse, expertly set. Well done, everyone.