Wings Over Scotland

We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.

Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.

That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.

And that matters more than you think it does.

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Wings readership stats for 2014:

Could have done worse.

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Scottish Labour clearly get a pretty good deal from the printers’ shop that makes the giant pound coins, because they’re waving them around again.

The North British branch office’s latest wizard jape is to upset all the people who they urged to join for £5 just last month – never mind the gullible saps forking out nine times that much – by offering cut-price memberships at £1 a year.

It’s what the retail trade calls a “loss leader” – in effect the party will be paying people to join, because £1 won’t come anywhere near to covering the cost of processing each new member, sending them a membership card and so on.

But it did give us an idea.

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A traditional brainteaser to test your Alert Reader Quotient for 2014. All the answers can be found somewhere on Wings (though not always in the obvious places).

Using the Search facility is cheating.

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The chief opponents of UK electoral reform are the Labour and Conservative parties, who by an astonishing coincidence are also the two parties who benefit by far the most from the undemocratic stitch-up that is First Past The Post, by which more than half of the votes cast in Britain result in no Parliamentary representation whatsoever.

The excuse they normally use to justify a system by which one of them will usually get a large absolute majority on barely over one-third of the votes cast is that FPTP produces “strong” governments, where “strong” is defined to mean “no possibility of the opposition, which speaks for two-thirds of the population, ever defeating the ruling party in a vote”.

The AV referendum was taken as a ringing endorsement of this principle, although in practice it offered just a bafflingly complicated and even less attractive version of the status quo. But a remarkable poll in Scotland this weekend (with detail published in today’s The National) shows that on one side of the border at least, FPTP has completely lost the support of the electorate.

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Several papers lead this morning with a Panelbase poll showing that a sizeable majority of Scots – regardless of their party allegiances – think that electing a large number of SNP MPs at next May’s UK general election will be the only practical way to safeguard Scotland’s interests in the wake of the referendum No vote.

This poll, currently live on the YouGov website, shows why:

The problem that will arise if most Scottish Labour MPs keep their seats in 2015 will be that there is only one Labour Party and it has only one leader.

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We’re still supposed to be on a skeleton service for the festive period, but we couldn’t just let this one slide. The cashflow problems at the Labour Party must be more severe than previously thought, because the entire organisation seems to be sharing a single email account. We got yet another begging letter today, from the same address previously named as “Iain McNicol” and “Ed Miliband”, but today’s one was credited to shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero.

Alert readers will recognise the appeal as one we’ve been watching for 11 days now. It’s an attempt by the UK party to raise some cash to employ 10 campaign assistants specifically for Scottish Labour. The jobs are still openly listed as such on the Labour website’s situations-vacant page. Yet the party seems oddly reluctant to say so.

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Wait, what?

We know there’s a lot of talk of the other Unionist parties stepping aside in order to give Scottish Labour a clear run in 2015, in a desperate attempt to stop the SNP from picking up too many seats, but this is surely taking it a bit far.

Merry Christmas, readers. Have a good one and we’ll see you soon.

We missed this on Sunday, because it was 17 minutes into on the short-lived and unlamented “Crossfire” (now binned for a Sunday edition of “Good Morning Scotland”) and therefore pretty much everyone in Scotland missed it. It’s former Labour minister Helen Liddell, or as we should properly address her, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke.

We’ve spared you her subsequent painful bleating about a general election 35 years ago that she doesn’t seem to have quite gotten over, but we couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at her curious assessment of the referendum result, which we suspect fellow guest Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell was simply too stunned to react to.

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From last night’s actually rather good “2014 – The Rory Review”:

BBC Scotland has 1,250 staff and an annual budget of just over £100 million. Yikes. We’re going to need a bigger fundraiser.