Wings Over Scotland

“Scottish Labour” apparently launched its election “manifesto” somewhere in Scotland today. The “leader” of the fringe “party”, Jon Murnaghan or something, seemingly got a bit confused and made a number of pledges regarding devolved issues over which the Westminster government to be elected next month will have no control whatsoever, and would properly belong in a manifesto for the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

Mr Morley or whatever his name is, who – assuming he wins his own seat – will be an insignificant backbench MP in the event of Ed Miliband’s Labour party winning the election, also said a bunch of other stuff about the SNP being “bad” because they refused to tell him what would be in their 2016 manifesto, further supporting the idea that the agitated branch official had lost track of what year it was.

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…of a story in the Scottish Sun today is something rather important.

Those are the words of David Cameron as he launched the Scottish Tories’ manifesto in front of a heavily-vetted invited audience in Glasgow yesterday. They make the pages of a couple of other papers, including the Guardian (which hides them even further down the page than the Sun does), but it’s only the Herald that picks up on their significance, leading its article with the unequivocal lines:

“David Cameron has emphatically ruled out a deal with the SNP to deliver the Nationalists’ demand for full fiscal autonomy.”

And that’s weird, because it’s actually pretty big news.

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So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?

Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?

Of tonight’s debate.

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Last night’s juxtaposition of somewhat contradictory front covers on the Herald and Scottish Daily Mail was modestly amusing, but nothing new. We pointed out weeks ago that papers on both the left and the right were – often on the same days – painting the SNP as hand-in-glove allies of either Labour or the Tories according to whatever suited their own agendas, and nothing’s changed in that respect.

But it’s interesting to take a look behind the headlines of the respective stories and see the degree to which the truth can be bent, exaggerated or in some cases simply made up from thin air.

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Sorry about this, readers. We know that YOU already know that the biggest party in a hung parliament has no special privileges when it comes to forming the government, but since those truth-dodging scamps Scottish Labour still won’t stop saying it (see below), we do still need to keep collating the evidence proving it’s a lie.

The bald-eagle-looking chap toting the cerise tie in this clip of this morning’s Victoria Derbyshire show on the BBC News channel is Lord (Andrew) Adonis, a former Labour government minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He also wrote the book “Five Days In May” about the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, despite having won almost 50 fewer seats than the Conservatives in that election. So he understands the process.

Lord Adonis does, in fairness, make a brief and half-hearted attempt at punting Jim Murphy’s “1924” line, but in the end he’s forced to concede (nudged along by Peter Riddell of the Institute for Government) that in fact the second-placed party forming the government is perfectly possible.

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How long do you think the papers can keep pretending that all the other papers don’t exist, or that we don’t see any of them, folks?

…hangs heavy about Scottish Labour. In an extraordinary piece on the STV website, the party today appeared to downgrade its bold assertion of just a few months ago that it could hold all 41 seats it won in Scotland in 2010, and perhaps win even more, to simply getting more than the SNP.

But the most remarkable thing happened at the end.

That, readers, is quite the admission. That’s a party which has utterly dominated UK politics in Scotland for six decades openly acknowledging that its entire campaign in the last three weeks will be based on railing against a complete fantasy.

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The BBC’s Robert Peston on yesterday’s Today programme. (About 2h 37m in.)

(Today, BBC Radio 4, 14 April 2015)
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Thank heavens that nice Mr Miliband’s going to stand up for austerity, eh?

The Daily Record gets up high on its outrage horse this morning with a front-page story titled “Double-crossed on devo”, echoing Jim Murphy’s claim of yesterday that the Tories’ manifesto pledge on “English votes for English laws” is a “betrayal” of the “Vow” signed by the three UK party leaders before the independence referendum.

Unsurprisingly, the Record gives rather less prominence to the news that the Vow isn’t worth the fake parchment it wasn’t written on than it did to repeatedly hyping it up and then proclaiming that it had already been delivered.

But there’s a twist.

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Don’t you just hate ’em?

Last week we listened to a Radio Scotland phone-in debate on Trident, hosted very deftly by John Beattie, who managed to steer callers away from political points and keep the discussion on the merits or otherwise of the weapons system itself.

Sadly that didn’t dissuade the usual coterie of nutters/local councillors phoning in insisting that (a) North Korea would invade/blast Scotland off the face of the Earth the moment we let our guard down, and (b) Helensburgh would immediately revert to the Stone Age at the loss of jobs were the few hundred Trident sailors who spend about a week every year in the town to be reassigned to other posts in the navy.

We didn’t have time to ring in ourselves, but we did manage to think of a much better idea that solved both of those problems without lumbering Scotland with a gigantic nuclear white elephant, and one that would also free up an awful lot of valuable police time and resources that are currently spent arresting a bunch of hippies.

See if you can pick any holes in it, readers.

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