Greg Moodie’s Election Dissection, a compilation of splendid cartoon strips from The National, Bella Caledonia and elsewhere, is available to order now.
Children’s author, billionaire and Labour donor JK Rowling, last year:
You feeling that popularity yet, readers?
An awkward time for poor Kezia Dugdale on the radio this morning.
We’ll just leave that there to help you out, Kez.
Taken in Greenock earlier, prior to the First Minister’s visit.
It seems an appropriate image for today.
This morning we noted the weird double standards of the media when it comes to reporting politics-related violence (and/or the absence thereof) in Scotland. We weren’t expecting such a good illustration of it to come along within two hours.
Amazingly enough, the Scottish press today ISN’T wall-to-wall with stories about Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, UK peer and lawmaker, endorsing the “f***ing booting” of Conservative supporters at the weekend, in a striking contrast to when a young SNP candidate said similar but less offensive things some months ago.
(Lord McConnell’s friends were talking in the future tense about something they would do. Mhairi Black was talking in the past tense, about things which she HADN’T done.)
As far as we’ve seen, the small piece above in the Scottish Sun is the only coverage. (The Daily Record, as well as not reporting the McConnell comments at all, actually has another go at Mhairi Black instead.)
But we were having trouble recalling any “hate-filled violent mobs” (McConnell’s actual full quote) on the Yes/SNP side. And so was an alert reader who had a dig through the papers from the last couple of years.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
