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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
On the left, Jim Murphy campaigning for the Scottish Labour leadership a few months ago (the backdrop is distinctive, placing the pic sometime last November).
On the right, Jim Murphy on STV tonight.
Don’t tell lies, readers. It drains your soul.
Remember that lovely British solidarity you were told by Labour to vote No for?
You probably need to read this, folks.
It’s come awfully late, but we’ve finally got an answer to a question people have been asking Jim Murphy since last December.
In an interview with the BBC’s Gary Robertson this morning, the Scottish Labour regional manager told listeners that should he win the East Renfrewshire seat in next month’s election, he’d stay in the job for the full five-year term, but would also stand for election as a Holyrood MSP in 2016.
And that raises more questions than it answers.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
