Wings Over Scotland

The general election 2015 has rounded the last bend and is heading down the final straight, with no clear winner in sight. Four days from now the UK electorate will go to the polls and deliver, if the numbers are to be believed, an unholy mess. Only one part of the country seems to know with clarity what it wants, and that’s “not Labour”.

The North British branch of the party has in truth been a political Easter egg for years – big and impressive-looking on the outside, but entirely hollow within – and this year it looks like the voters are finally going to shatter the shell and leave nothing but a small heap of fragments revealing just how little chocolate was ever there.

And the realisation has sent Labour completely out of its mind.

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This is the Labour-supporting Sunday People today:

And this is its Labour-supporting sister paper the Sunday Mail:

But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

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Scottish Labour’s chief of staff in February:

The same man tonight:

Does the biggest party form the government or doesn’t it, John?

So there’s this, which isn’t the biggest surprise.

Having already told the people of Scotland to get stuffed and forget about having any sort of voice in government if they wouldn’t vote for Labour, there’s no major shock in Miliband doing the same to those in Wales.

But alert readers may have noticed that there’s one more Celtic nation in the UK that hasn’t been mentioned yet. What’s the Labour position there?

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We know that politicians are allowed to lie in election literature, but we’re struggling to see how this isn’t fraud, which is something different altogether.

Click the image to see both letters full-size.

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Do you remember the Labour and media outrage a while back when SNP candidate Mhairi Black said she felt like “putting the nut” on some gloating Unionists at the indyref count, readers? Remember the pious scandal at such dreadful thuggery? (If you’d forgotten, don’t worry, because it’s in the Telegraph again today.)

Remember how the Daily Record and Scotsman have now been hammering away for a full week at another SNP candidate, Neil Hay, for tweeting a link to a satirical website and arguably being slightly rude about a small subset of pensioners, while glossing over a lengthy catalogue of abusive tweets calling the SNP “fascists” and “Nazis” (and more) from a prominent Labour activist and BBC pundit?

There’s your actual former First Minister and peer of the UK realm, Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, setting the example Labour would have everyone follow today by celebrating a threat to “f*****g boot” any Tories in Wishaw (we’re not told whether the young ladies in question were Labour activists he was with or just Labour voters).

But there’s more.

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The Daily Mirror’s “Ampp3d” offshoot used to be a fantastic resource for statistical debunking, and sometimes still is. But ever since it’s been officially absorbed into the Mirror, it’s been increasingly deployed as a Labour spin tool.

Today it tries to juggle numbers to excuse Gordon Brown’s bargain-basement sale of the UK’s gold reserves in 1999 – a subject that was raised by an audience member on last night’s Question Time special and which we now know with certainty cost the country a whopping $19bn (or £12.5bn at current exchange rates).

“The Tories want you to believe that selling the gold in 1999 cost the taxpayer many billions of pounds. Here’s how his fantasy maths works:

Selling the gold at an average price of $277/oz made the government a total of $3.5 billion. With gold prices peaking at $1,780.65 the government could have made as much as $22.5 billion. But anyone who says they can predict the price of anything 12 years in the future is completely bonkers.”

We’ve added the emphasis on that last sentence. And it’s a fair enough point broadly speaking, although of course with the gold sell-off we’re looking back with the benefit of hindsight about what actually did happen, not trying to guess, so calling it “fantasy maths” is somewhat inaccurate, given that it’s exactly the opposite of a fantasy.

The trouble is that Ampp3d isn’t always so dismissive of predicting the future.

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Today’s Scottish Sun has a full breakdown of all 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, including bookies’ odds for the favourite in each one. It suggests that nine Labour MPs will have jobs in Scotland a week from today, along with two Tories and a single lonely Lib Dem, with the SNP sweeping the other 47.

We ran the incumbents in those 12 seats through MP Report Card, an independent site which tracks the activity of all the UK’s MPs including expenses claims, outside earnings, how often they turn up to vote or speak in debates and how good they are at replying to constituents’ letters, to gauge their calibre.

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We’re only doing stats posts quarterly now, but since the last one we ran was for the January readership figures that means it’s time for a quick update.

Almost 23,000 extra readers compared to last month and nearly 600,000 more page views? Yeah, we’ll take that. (For perspective, here’s April 2014.)

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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.