Wings Over Scotland

There’s a very strange article on the front page of the Herald website this morning. It’s an interview with Nigel Farage in which the UKIP leader insists that his party, not the SNP, will hold the balance of power in the UK parliament after May’s election.

It’s a bold assertion given that current projections put the SNP on anywhere from 30 to 56 seats with UKIP expected to struggle to get 5 to 10. But Farage’s rationale for the statement is an interesting one.

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The abusive Facebook comments recently directed at Labour MP Margaret Curran and highlighted in a piece on the STV website today make us sigh. Not only are they horrible but they’re counter-productive, in every sense of the term – they’re not going to change Curran’s mind about anything by yelling at her, and they feed a narrative about “vile cybernats” that the media is all too eager to gleefully perpetuate.

So let’s make something clear from the off: shut up, idiots. You’re not helping.

But then let’s tell the rest of the story.

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The Daily Mash, 12 February 2015:

Because a good satirist can sometimes make a point better in seven sentences than idiots like us can in a 1000-word article, and make it funny at the same time.

The very few readers who don’t immediately just snort and turn the page when they see the words “George Foulkes” may have noticed in yesterday’s Herald that the thirsty peer could be found gloating gleefully that had Scotland voted for independence last September it would now be “bankrupt” due to the decline in oil prices.

We can’t be bothered pointing out for the 500th time that a Yes vote wouldn’t have seen Scotland actually independent until March 2016, and that the oil price NOW is therefore about as relevant to anything as, well, Baron Foulkes himself.

But we couldn’t help noticing a couple of small arithmetical details.

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There really isn’t very much of a news story in this morning’s Sun “exclusive” that some Labour MPs say they’d quit the party rather than work with the SNP should the electorate deliver such a result in May. One told the paper:

“I would quit the party — there’s no way I would sit alongside them.

We’ve just spent three years knocking lumps out of each other in the independence referendum, how could we then share power?”

Those of us who remember the parade of furious Scottish Labour figures going on TV and openly threatening to scupper any “rainbow coalition” involving the Nats in 2010, thereby ensuring that David Cameron and George Osborne came to power, won’t be the least bit surprised at the sheer depth of hatred and jealous rage that consumes Labour’s branch office in North Britain when the SNP are mentioned.

And there’s nothing eyebrow-raisingly new in Scottish Labour’s spiteful determination that if Scots vote against the Conservatives – but not for Labour – they should be punished with Tory governments. It’s the standard policy of electoral blackmail that the party has deployed against the rise of rivals from the left for years, and which it’s now also turning against the Greens south of the border.

But there is a telling phrase in that short quote.

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We figured you’d probably want to see this.

(Skip to 3.00 to get past the pointless title frame. Text of speech here.)

Independent website Political Compass has just released its 2015 graph charting the ideological positions of all the political parties of the UK. It’s a fairly predictable one.

On the image above, we’ve added, for parties active in Scotland only, striped circles indicating each party’s 2010 position. But what does it tell us about 2015?

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It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

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The Telegraph, 13 September 2014:

“Scotland heading for a ‘Great Depression’ after a Yes vote

A study by Deutsche Bank said a Yes vote for Scottish independence would ‘go down in history as a political and economic mistake’ on a par with Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failures by the Federal Reserve in America that triggered the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It warned that Scotland risked a similar depression if voters backed the Yes campaign on Thursday, and described the desire for independence as an ‘incomprehensible’ one which could have negative consequences ‘far beyond’ what people had imagined.

Gordon Brown said the Deutsche Bank report showed that Scotland was ‘in danger of falling through an economic trapdoor’.”

We can only assume something pretty amazing must have happened since then.

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A number of readers last night sent us copies of the response to complaints they’d made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the Daily Record’s infamous “The Vow” front cover. We attach the full judgement at the bottom of this article, and as far as we’re concerned it’s fair and accurate. The Vow was a deliberate deception, but it didn’t break any rules – it merely relied on readers misinterpreting it.

The bit we’re still interested in is the paragraph above.

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We know we were all traumatised at the time, but how on Earth did we miss this?

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It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.

The article concluded with some comments from Labour.

“It was reported last month that Labour will include a commitment in its general election manifesto to ensure major sporting such as the Open Championship are shown on terrestrial TV.

Scottish leader Jim Murphy told the Scotland and Sunday events like the Open and international football “shouldn’t be a minority sport for only those who can afford satellite television subscriptions”.

A party spokesman said today: “We’re happy to send the SNP Government links to all the announcements Jim Murphy and Kez Dugdale have made so that it is easier for them to adopt our policies.”

Which is, y’know, bold.

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