Wings Over Scotland

I started lurking on PoliticalBetting.com in the run up to the referendum and enjoyed reading the “robust” debates. A couple of months after the vote I got more actively involved and was immediately puzzled as to why many PBers, commentators, party strategists and – particularly – supposedly infallible bookmakers were all struggling to accept the accuracy of the Scottish opinion polls.

At this point the polls were already indicating that Scottish Labour was going to lose many of its 41 seats and could end up with fewer than five. I started commenting that from where I sitting in Stirling the opinion polls were accurate, the SNP surge was real and indeed that it had not yet peaked.

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We reported last night on the mealy-mouthed semi-correction the Daily Telegraph has finally been forced to grudgingly publish with regards to its incompetent and inaccurate creation of the “Memogate” scandal. The paper – we’re loath to prefix it with the word “news” – has now suffered the full weight, such as it is, of the press regulator IPSO, and will not have to answer any further for its actions.

And that just leaves us with the source.

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At 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, three months after publishing the original falsehood, the Daily Telegraph has finally quietly pushed out the sort-of admission that it told a lie before the general election about the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, wanting David Cameron to remain as UK Prime Minister – a claim intended to damage her party politically in the aforementioned election.

The toothless press watchdog IPSO has allowed the Telegraph to merely publish its adjudication by way of correction. No apology is offered to the First Minister, and the Telegraph can’t quite bring itself to concede that its facts were wrong, even though they’ve now been denied by every single party to the incident – Ms Sturgeon, the French ambassador, the French Consul-General and the former Secretary of State for Scotland who leaked a memo about their meeting to the press, Alistair Carmichael.

(More on him in a few hours, incidentally.)

Such, we must apparently accept, is justice for the British media.

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In our latest Panelbase opinion poll, conducted last week in association with the Sunday Times, we wanted to complete the work we started previously in analysing the public’s reaction to Labour’s election strategies.

What we found last time was that almost every decision the party had taken in Scotland under the regional managership of Jim Murphy had been massively at odds with the Scottish electorate.

Whether it was booze at football, full fiscal autonomy or the Named Person initiative for child welfare, the voters were full-square behind the SNP, and every new policy Scottish Labour unveiled doomed them further. Anything that could be got wrong was.

This time we were curious about the effects in the whole UK, and with regard to one landmark moment in particular.

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We’re not due a traffic post this month, so we’ll just leave this here.

(From a new Panelbase poll. More findings coming soon.)

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As the petition to save them is dismissed as a “social media experiment” and as Greggs announces it will persist in removing the macaroni pie from its line, I find that my hackles have reached hitherto unrealised heights.

Just who do these people – quislings and traitors to the cause of quality baked goods – think they are? Even the wonderful Nicola (may her name be praised) has expressed ambivalence as to their merits, preferring not to partake at a personal level.

I am no stranger to feelings of righteous indignation, but why does this issue drive me to print in a way that the recent rebuffs to Holyrood’s permanence and full fiscal autonomy did not? Allow me to explain.

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We’ll never tire of documenting the Daily Record’s increasingly panicked attempts to get David Cameron to enact the Record’s dodgy promise of last September and save it from having to answer for the pup it sold Scotland.

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The Daily Record has a major editorial in today’s edition bleating piteously about the way David Mundell and the Conservative government have – to everyone’s complete and utter astonishment, except not so much – ignored the wishes of almost all the MPs elected by the Scottish people just two months ago and blocked every single amendment to the Scotland Bill.

The picture above, by alert reader Neil Hepburn, seems to sum the situation up.

The Sunday Post’s lobby reporter James Millar noticed today that all the parties have submitted their nominations to sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster.

As has already been noted, the majority of the committee – seven from 11 – are MPs for English seats (list below). But one name in particular caught our attention.

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Two nights of political debate on the BBC:

Six unionists, two nationalists. What’s that all about, then?

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