Wings Over Scotland

One of the most interesting things about the recent Ashcroft polls is the flurry of articles they’ve provoked in the media, as London-based political commentators try to outdo each other in displaying their complete ignorance of Scottish politics.

It’s eerily reminiscent of the sudden surge of activity when the gaps in referendum polls reached margin-of-error levels, and metropolitan journalists suddenly realised that Scotland was taking the referendum far more seriously than they were.

Two of the most revealing have been in the Spectator, with James Forsyth saying the Unionist collaborations in the No campaign “marked a recognition that Great Britain is far bigger, and far more important, than party politics”, and Fraser Nelson becoming Scottish Labour’s most unlikely cheerleader, saying “Finally, a confession. I’d like the Tories to win the next election, but not as much as I want Jim Murphy to do well”.

But amid all the outpourings of grief and befuddlement, it’s startling how little analysis there really is into why the UK is in the situation it currently is. And it’s odd because the answer isn’t the least bit complicated.

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The letter below is extraordinary, readers. See if it fits with what you remember.

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Only a few diehards in the press are still clinging this morning to the Labour fiction we exposed yesterday, namely the flat-out empirical falsehood that “the biggest party gets to form a government” in the event of a hung Parliament.

The Daily Record’s hapless political editor Torcuil Crichton desperately fought against the proven facts on Good Morning Scotland as an incredulous Iain Macwhirter looked on, and a few of the party’s more unhinged supporters battle on on social media, but after some diligent battering away with evidence it looks like we’ve finally managed to get the message through to most of a reluctant media.

But why was it ever in doubt?

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Even we can’t quite believe this one, readers.

Good grief, where do we even start?

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As that’s where Scottish Labour is led from, of course. The Ashcroft polls leaked late last night have, it’s fair to say, caused a certain degree of furore among politics types.

Contrary to some expectations, the figures could scarcely have been worse. Of 16 seats polled – 14 held by Labour and two Lib Dem – 15 would go to the SNP on staggering swings of over 20%. Labour’s Glasgow heartlands would be all but wiped out, with only Willie Bain in Glasgow North East barely clinging on.

The SNP will undoubtedly be cock-a-hoop, but will almost certainly also be feverishly warning activists that polls don’t win seats and reminding them of the party’s own spectacular recovery in the 2011 Holyrood election from what looked like disaster just a couple of months out from the vote.

Lord Ashcroft himself points out (as we did ourselves on Twitter last night) that the seats he polled were mainly in areas that voted Yes last year, and so may be unduly flattering the SNP. But it’s worth seeing them in context.

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By now we imagine most readers have already seen the alleged leak of the Ashcroft polling results which aren’t due to be officially released until 11am today [EDIT 00.47am: out now], and which suggest some jaw-dropping SNP gains.

We’re not going to go off half-cocked until those have been confirmed, so instead here’s something sent in by an alert reader. It’s an extract from the autobiography of former Radio 1 DJ Liz Kershaw, and describes events around the funeral of Princess Diana. We think you’ll find it enlightening.

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From the latest YouGov polling. Ooft.

Remarkably, 26% of people planning to vote Labour in May, and an astounding 54% of likely Tory voters, say the SNP are the best guarantors of more powers, while 21% of Labour voters and 37% of Tories also answer “SNP” to the second question.

We wouldn’t want to be in Scottish Labour’s shoes if they were made of diamonds.

We pondered long and hard over how best to analyse Scottish Labour’s bewildering, oh-my-God-they’re-really-calling-it-that “Vow Plus” fiasco from yesterday, readers.

We contemplated noting the absurdity of Gordon Brown being its frontman when he’s not standing in May and won’t be in Parliament to deliver it. We considered a forensic deconstruction showing how it’s just the same old reheated, uncosted rubbish they’ve been waffling around for the past years.

(“Give Holyrood control of housing benefit, separating it out from the rest of the UK’s Universal Credit by mumble mumble! Increase pensions using the extra cash freed up by mumble mumble! Devolve workfare, which somehow magically ‘creates jobs’ by mumble mumble! Pretend we just said ‘1000 nurses’ all along, not the demented ‘1000 more than anything the SNP say’!”)

We thought about pointing out all the comical flapping the party’s done around its devolution proposals, presenting the weary and confused Scottish people with feeble, grudging, underwhelming plan after feeble, grudging, underwhelming plan – at least five different ones since 2009 – and resentfully upping the offer by the bare minimum they think they can get away with every time.

And we wondered if it was worth drawing attention to the fact that the latest effort is actually basically the Strathclyde Commission blueprint from the Conservatives with a red sticker hastily slapped on it.

But in the end, the truth is a lot simpler than that.

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There’s currently a fake “petition” on the Labour website.

Ostensibly it’s gathering signatures representing opposition to the bedroom tax, but in fact its only purpose is to harvest email addresses so that Labour can then bombard unwitting recipients with dodgy, untruthful solicitations for cash. (What would actually be the point of a petition about the bedroom tax at this stage?)

That’s not the terrible thing about it, though.

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We’ve already said all we’ve got to say on this one.

We haven’t done a monthly stats post for a few months, partly because naturally traffic’s been down after the insane spike of last September, partly because we had two weeks off in October (and a semi-break over Christmas and New Year), and partly because we’ve moved to new, more accurate and more detailed figures direct from our webhost and January was the first full month of them.

So here, for those of you who like to keep track, are the headlines:

We’re pretty blown away by that, to be honest. A tiny fraction shy of 300,000 unique readers (in what’s traditionally a very slow month for politics, and one we didn’t really start until the second week) is 157% up on a year ago, and nearly 50,000 higher than last May, which was the all-time high until the mad last few weeks of the referendum campaign. (It’s the 3rd-highest ever, after September and August 2014.)

If you’d told us we’d be anywhere near those sorts of numbers four months after a No vote (or indeed if we’d even still be going four months after a No vote), we’d have said you were missing a few marbles. But as long as you’re still here, we will be too*.

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Blah blah Jim Murphy blah blah idiot something.

The way this match is going, we’ll see you sometime in April.