Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers were startled yesterday when a former UK Prime Minister who WASN’T Gordon Brown suddenly took it upon himself to lumber out of his crypt and unleash an unsolicited intervention in the general election campaign.

“Referring to Ms Sturgeon, who is not standing for a Westminster seat, he insisted: ‘If you want to talk about de-legitimising, I would like to know what someone who isn’t even a candidate for the House of Commons is doing talking about her party changing the policy and politics of the government of the whole of the United Kingdom.'”

As apparently that’s now the requirement for anyone attempting to influence a vote in Britain, we’re sure Sir John – a man best remembered in the world of politics for cheating on his wife with one of his ministers and instituting the Cones Hotline – will remind us which constituency he’s standing for any minute now.

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Sometimes it’s hard to find the words, readers.

Where do you even start when grown adults will say something that dim?

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If you thought the right-wing press was having paroxysms at the weekend, readers, you’re going to love what they had lined up for the day of the SNP manifesto launch.

Let’s have a little tour of the London newsrooms, shall we?

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The splendid video below is a short clip from one of a Scottish Labour “campaign rally” held on Saturday morning. (And we do mean Saturday morning – the gathering seen in the distance at the very beginning as Murphy walks up through a deserted Buchanan Street appear to be waiting outside the Sainsbury’s Local, which opens at 7am.)

One can only admire Anas Sarwar’s upbeat view of his audience. But from the broader perspective, readers might be forgiven for wondering what on Earth was going on.

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Our alert readers will probably be aware of the psychological phenomenon commonly known as the five stages of grief. If not, there’s a rather good piece by Andrew Nicoll in today’s Scottish Sun about it in the context of Scottish Labour.

But while perceptive, Nicoll is a little behind the times, because it appears that the party’s branch office manager Jim Murphy has invented a sixth.

Welcome, viewers, to the new final stage of grief: delusion.

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Impressive as it is in a party with Jackie Baillie in it, Kezia Dugdale has carved out quite a reputation in Scottish Labour as a specialist in making categorical statements of facts which turn out not to be true. So we were naturally sceptical when she claimed on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland that Stewart Hosie of the SNP hadn’t said whether a commitment to a second independence referendum would be in tomorrow’s SNP manifesto.

We thought that he had, and so did presenter Gordon Brewer, but Dugdale was most adamant – “I listened VERY carefully, very carefully indeed” –  that he’d “dodged and dived” on the matter, and spent more than a minute of her interview saying so.

So we went back and checked, because that’s what we do.

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Countless thousands of words – indeed, even an entire book – have been written by commentators and pundits right across the political spectrum about the long demise of the Labour Party in Scotland.

It remains to be seen whether the coming election will deliver the coup de grace that pollsters are predicting. Meanwhile, though, readers searching for an explanation but short on free time could do a lot worse than sit through this interview with the Scottish branch office deputy manager, Kezia Dugdale, from today’s Sunday Politics Scotland.

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The Sunday Times front page today reports (although in fact we can’t find the story anywhere on its website or in its iPad app) the 8,745th “intervention” by Gordon Brown in Scottish politics, the thing which is at least notionally still his actual day job.

We’re going to need someone to explain to us why even the punch-drunk inhabitants of Scottish Labour HQ could possibly imagine that to be a good idea.

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A variant on the story below appears in most of the right-wing press today.

That’s the Daily Mail version, which is the most detailed. The Express’s reporting was similar. But in order to manufacture a grievance on behalf of UKIP and the Tories, every paper which covers the story is required to torture the data beyond all reason.

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In the wake of the latest Ashcroft polls, the only line being deployed by Scottish Labour is that the projected outcome of an SNP landslide would be great news for the Conservatives and lead to David Cameron returning in triumph to Downing Street. One would presume, then, that the Tory press is delighted by the prospect.

So let’s check out some stories from today’s Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Mail.

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