Wings Over Scotland

Earlier today Gordon Brown gave a speech in London, on a subject and for reasons which are unclear. It was widely trailed in the press, however, as an intervention in the Labour leadership campaign, with the particular goal of stopping Jeremy Corbyn from winning. It was – naturally – broadcast live and in full by the BBC News channel.

Corbyn wasn’t mentioned by name so far as we noticed, but to tell the truth we drifted in and out of the rambling, 49-minute, 30-page monologue full of celebrity namedrops and unconnected anecdotes, hypnotised as we were by Brown’s relentless pacing up and down the room like a caged animal.

Nobody who isn’t getting paid should have to endure the entire grimness of it, so using the magic of technology we’ve compressed it all down to a mere fraction of its length (just 20%) for you, but without losing any of the tone, content or intellectual nuance.

We offer it to you as an elegy. It marks the day that Labour reanimated the walking corpse of the only person left in the party that it considers to have any gravitas – not to win an election, but to try to crush the first man in living memory to enthuse tens of thousands of new members to join a political party in the hope of restoring the values it was created to uphold.

It is the day the soul of the Labour Party finally died.

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Here’s former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris in today’s Sunday Times:

“The toughest job for an opposition leader is to get people’s attention and Kez will make a good job of that. She is different from what you’d normally expect.

But the only thing that would make people give Labour a second glance at the moment is offering something that I am absolutely opposed to, and that is independence. The only way we can attract voters back is by offering them what they want and that is independence.”

Wait, what now?

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Reporting on the election of Kezia Dugdale as Scottish Labour’s sixth leader in eight years, the BBC quotes her as saying “We are changing. I am part of a new generation. Someone without the baggage of the past”.

Keen followers of First Minister’s Questions will doubtless be excited to witness the weekly jousts, as the dynamic new regime of Kezia Dugdale sweeps out the tired old broom of Labour’s previous FMQs inquisitor, er, Kezia Dugdale.

Curiously, while the BBC was present and broadcasting live at the announcement of the new leader and deputy, neither’s acceptance speech was broadcast on TV, radio or online, which may well have surprised viewers and listeners who’ve become used to 50-minute prime-time Gordon Brown “intervention” specials.

In Dugdale’s case, our best guess is that the BBC didn’t want to have to fact-check it.

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There’s another rather bizarre Kenny Farquharson column in today’s Times. Under the headline “Holyrood wasn’t built for a one-party state”, it asserts that “the Scottish Parliament is no longer fit for purpose” on the grounds that the opposition parties are useless, as if that were the fault of the electoral system rather than their leaders.

After that, though, it just gets flat-out insulting.

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The papers these days are full of horrendous stories. For some reason this one just tripped a nerve, and we wanted to do something. Click here for details.

According to the Telegraph.

We’re not sure which one’s Michelle Mone.

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This debate between John “Mental Mad” McTernan and Owen Jones from the BBC News channel this morning doesn’t need a lot of commentary from us, to be honest.

It’s like watching someone try to reason with voicemail.

Here’s Michelle Mone on last night’s Channel 4 News:

When presenter Matt Frei sympathetically puts to her that she left Scotland because she was being “given a very very hard time” by Yes/SNP supporters, Mone denies it, saying “I didn’t actually leave, that wasn’t the main reason to have left Scotland”.

So where could Frei have come by such a misapprehension?

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But you have to admit it has a ring of truth about it.

(From tonight’s Scotland 2015.)

You can’t move for Michelle Mone in the media today, which is just the way she likes it. Almost every newspaper and broadcaster has been running lengthy stories and interviews about the publicity-craving ex-Labour supporter being commissioned by Iain Duncan Smith to produce a report on starting up businesses in disadvantaged areas.

(So excited was Mone – who now backs the Conservatives and is widely expected to be given a peerage in the next honours list by David Cameron for campaigning against Scottish independence – to be working for IDS that she just couldn’t keep the news in until the midnight embargo on the press release, tweeting it at 11pm last night.)

Nationalists have in the main reacted to Mone’s apparent imminent ennoblement as an unelected lawmaker in the manner you’d expect, but they’re not the only people to question her credentials as an expert business adviser and employment guru. So we thought we’d do a little digging and compiling.

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Social media is alight today with the latest extraordinary opinion poll for next May’s Holyrood election, which puts the SNP on a record-breaking 62% to Labour’s 20%.

(The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats trail in with miserable stats of 12% and 3% respectively, which means that within the standard margin of polling error it’s possible that NOBODY in Scotland is still planning on voting Lib Dem.)

Pollsters TNS report the findings under what might in the circumstances be seen as the slightly negative headline “SNP holds poll lead in spite of mixed views on record in government”, which relates to figures concerning the Nats’ performance in power.

But there’s an interesting quirk in those numbers.

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