This article originally appeared on Allan’s blog. Reproduced with permission.
Dear Richard Leonard,
You can accept this letter as my formal resignation from membership of the Labour Party. And you may not like to hear that you are the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Politics in 2018 is almost impossible to satirise, and nowhere more so than in Scotland, where at least two of the main parties are currently campaigning on the principled policy of “any referendum we lose should be re-run, and any we win must never ever be held again because the decision was final”.
So it’s quite understandable that the Dateline 2018 team – Scotland’s only currently operating satirists of any kind (which is, madly, true) – opted not to bother with any Scottish content in their last series. But they’ve totally promised that they’ll absolutely definitely do some this time, honest, if you fund them for another one.
Yeah, we’d be sceptical too. But they only need £7,500 by tomorrow to carry on, and if they don’t reach the target you get your money back, so if you just got paid and can spare a couple of quid then fire it their way by clicking on the pic, because frankly we don’t like to think about what they’d get up to if we don’t keep them occupied.
We hadn’t been intending to talk about this again today, but the John Beattie show on Radio Scotland just ran a segment that we really can’t let go unremarked.
Here’s the whole thing. Some of that’s going to need interpreting for the sane.
We’ve been keeping coverage of our ongoing court battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale to a minimum on the site, partly because little of any material impact has actually happened yet.
However, there was a mildly interesting development last night, which was scooped and accurately reported by the Scottish Sun.
Reactions to the party’s statement have already seen serious amounts of what we’re generously going to call “misinformation” generated and circulating around social media, so we’re going to have to clear some of it up. Apologies.
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
Sounds terrible. Let’s take a look in more depth at this rising tide.
Tory MSP Miles Briggs was yesterday cleared of sexual harassment claims by an internal Conservative Party inquiry process. We haven’t the slightest idea of what the facts of his specific case may or may not be, and as such express no view on it, but the nature of the process has been severely criticised by Rape Crisis Scotland, and with what in this instance appears to be extremely good reason.
An obvious question does rather leap to mind, though.
We’ve been watching the Labour Party annual conference today, at which North British Branch Office manager Richard Leonard apparently gave a speech.
Unfortunately the BBC News coverage wasn’t very helpful with its captioning, so we have no idea which of the people below is him. Can anyone help?
We think it’s fair to say that our bestest friend in all of the internet, Scottish Labour activist Duncan Hothersall, is absolutely hopping mad about the latest developments in our court case against the branch office’s former leader Kezia Dugdale.
But keen followers of Dunc might particularly enjoy this demonstration of his legendary grasp of fine factual detail.
So for old times’ sake, let’s have a Kezia Dugdale(-Related) Fact Check.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
