Wings Over Scotland

Jim Murphy didn’t turn up at Westminster today to vote with the Tories for £30bn of austerity cuts, like 28 of his Scottish Labour colleagues did. That’s because he was taking some Scottish journalists to lunch to explain an important thing to them.

We’ve been sat staring at a blank paragraph for the last 10 minutes trying to think of something satirical to say. We’ve got nothing, readers.

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Alert readers may recall that since the election of Jim Murphy as Scottish Labour branch office manager he’s barely gone a moment without promising to “reach out” to Yes voters. Last month he even pledged that he’d employ some in his team if he won the Labour job.

We imagine they’ll be fair hammering on his door after the latest addition to his crew, because today’s Herald reveals that Murphy’s new chief of staff, and joining “Better Together” director Blair McDougall among Jim’s backroom boys, is to be our old pal John “there will be no referendum” McTernan.

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From today’s Telegraph:

Actual number of children belonging to Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell: 0.

You literally can’t make this stuff up.

We had to extend our festive semi-break for a day to deal with some administrative matters, readers, but it’s just as well, because the thing that happened today would have defied our best attempts at either analysis or satire.

That’s a real thing we didn’t make up. Saints preserve us.

Wait, what?

We know there’s a lot of talk of the other Unionist parties stepping aside in order to give Scottish Labour a clear run in 2015, in a desperate attempt to stop the SNP from picking up too many seats, but this is surely taking it a bit far.

We missed this on Sunday, because it was 17 minutes into on the short-lived and unlamented “Crossfire” (now binned for a Sunday edition of “Good Morning Scotland”) and therefore pretty much everyone in Scotland missed it. It’s former Labour minister Helen Liddell, or as we should properly address her, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke.

We’ve spared you her subsequent painful bleating about a general election 35 years ago that she doesn’t seem to have quite gotten over, but we couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at her curious assessment of the referendum result, which we suspect fellow guest Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell was simply too stunned to react to.

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Fans of the bewildering in Scottish politics don’t look set to be disappointed in 2015.

Jim Murphy’s only been the Scottish Labour “leader” for a week, but already he seems hell-bent on hurling the party’s North British branch into the padded walls of its cell with more vigour than ever before, heroically ignoring the open door.

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Social media has been alive in recent days with No voters concocting a fiendish plan to vote tactically against the SNP at next year’s general election. Labour supporters are urging people to vote Conservative rather than let the SNP take any new seats which might be used to secure a better devolution settlement for Scotland.

We’re not sure the Nats have too much to worry about.

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We’ve been watching in some bafflement the continuation of this bizarre non-story from yesterday. (For which, incidentally, the P&J has published a correction today.)

As one in five Scottish children live in poverty and temperatures fall at the beginning of winter with many families facing the choice between heating their homes or buying food, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie apparently arrived at the conclusion that the most important thing he could be doing with his taxpayer-funded time was occupying the Scottish Parliament with a demand to know (for no immediately apparent reason) how often civil servants had accessed Wings Over Scotland in the six months leading up to the referendum.

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The Daily Record last month:

But that’s not even the funny bit.

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It’s the beaten side who are supposed to lose their minds. But we couldn’t resist sharing with you two articles by Labour activists today whose authors have studied the last decade of Scottish politics and arrived at the conclusion that the salvation of Scottish Labour lies in… ramping up the arrogance and hating the SNP more.

Oh, you’re going to love these.

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The Guardian today carries an article by Gordon Brown, which echoes the content of his speech to the House Of Commons on Thursday. We’ve read it over and over again trying to make any sort of coherent sense out of it, but we’ve drawn a blank. The mighty architect of “The Vow” appears to have not the slightest idea what he actually proposes as a constitutional settlement for the UK and Scotland.

But perhaps we’ve missed something.

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