Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.

IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.

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The Independent Press Standards Organisation has delivered its verdict on the Daily Record’s coverage of the Smith Commission recommendations on 27 November 2014, after we lodged a complaint with the watchdog body.

We attach its findings below. (Emphases ours.)

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We were going to bring you a report on the Scottish Conservatives conference in Edinburgh today (half the length of last year’s, and bereft of its glamorous sprinkling of Cabinet ministers), but we watched all of it and absolutely nothing happened.

They won the referendum and tax is bad. The end. See you next year!

This is the Minister for Care and Support, Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, on last night’s Question Time, letting Scotland know its status as an equal and valued partner in the UK, a partner whose democratically-elected MPs have the same right to have their voice heard on behalf of their constituents as those from anywhere else.

Glad we cleared that one up.

These are starting to get a bit surreal.

“Vote Labour, get SNP!”

“Vote UKIP, get trade unions!”

We’ve added them to the list. Keep ’em peeled, folks!

We got fooled like big old chumps earlier this afternoon. Scottish Labour apparatchik and former “Better Together” director Blair McDougall posted a series of tweets about whether the party who wins the most seats in a Westminster election gets to form the government, which sounded exactly like the ones Scottish Labour have been posting for the last few weeks before they were exposed as being nonsense.

The big comedy reveal was that they turned out to have been said by Alex Salmond in 2007, talking about the Holyrood election of that year which the SNP won.

It was a bona fide zinger. So what point did the cunning prank prove?

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It’s not often you get to see someone actually thinking out loud.

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Remember before the referendum, readers, when the £30bn cost of decommissioning oil platforms was a nightmarish unaffordable millstone around a future Scotland’s neck that proved it couldn’t be independent?

It turns out it wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

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This week Scottish Labour quietly abandoned their “biggest party forms the government” election campaign after it was comprehensively debunked by this site and, belatedly, the mainstream media. An alert reader reminded us this evening of how the party wasn’t always so attached to the rules.

Because back in 2007, when Labour was neither the biggest party nor the incumbent administration, it had a damn good try at forming the government anyway.

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All this year we’ve been noticing a curious re-writing of history in the Scottish and UK media. It’s spanned left-wing and right-wing press, and even Yes-friendly voices like Iain Macwhirter and the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier have been sucked in.

Yet it’s such a fundamentally bizarre misunderstanding of a political system that’s now been running in Scotland for 16 years that we’re bewildered at the way everyone’s suddenly decided that it happened.

The latest occurrence of this odd phenomenon was in yesterday’s Daily Record, and the subject is the newly-alleged “informal deal” between the minority SNP government of 2007-11 and the Scottish Conservatives.

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The election of Jim Murphy as branch office leader has so far failed to produce a shift in the party’s catastrophic polling figures north of the border, with most projections still suggesting that Labour’s Scottish seats will be reduced to single figures in May.

Last night we catalogued a series of its howlers since Murphy took over, culminating in a humiliating climbdown over some false claims about cancelled operations in the Scottish NHS. The party’s Scottish health spokeswoman Jenny Marra turned up on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the subject, and in doing so demonstrated exactly why Scottish voters are deserting it in hundreds of thousands.

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There’s been considerable mirth in nationalist circles ever since Jim Murphy became leader of the Scottish Labour branch office late last year. Announcing that he wanted to “reach out” to Yes voters, his idea of an olive branch was to hire three of the most divisive and obnoxious figures to be found anywhere in his party’s entire hinterland, in a move about as conciliatory and unifying as when Rangers signed Mo Johnston.

Counter-intuitively, the link-up with Blair McDougall (who headed Murphy’s successful leadership bid) is the one that makes the most sense. After all, as “Better Together” campaign director McDougall was responsible for turning a 30-point lead for No into a 10-point one, so he clearly knows something about how to appeal to Yes people.

But for a man widely cited as smart and savvy, Murphy also staffing his office with comically unpleasant Twitter troll John McTernan and the nutter-fringe imbecile Susan Dalgety – someone who was last seen resigning in disgrace after likening the SNP to the Omagh bombers – was harder to understand.

And the non-stop trainwreck that has followed leaves only one explanation.

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