It’s another tumultuous Jim Murphy Rally, readers!
We’re just putting this shot of today’s brief Edinburgh gathering (from Isabel Hardman of the Spectator) here for the record, so people can compare it with the footage and images that appear on tonight’s news bulletins and tomorrow’s newspapers.
Lord Digby Jones, formerly head of the famously politically neutral CBI, on the SNP.
We’re going to have to check what the CBI’s position on electoral reform was before First Past The Post threatened to elect a load of SNP MPs and became a democratic outrage in the process. We’ll get back to you on that one.
A new Wings Over Scotland exclusive, coming to you every Wednesday at noon.
You lucky, lucky people.
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.
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.
Sometimes it’s hard to find the words, readers.
Where do you even start when grown adults will say something that dim?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
