Wings Over Scotland

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.

Kate Devlin of the Herald has been a political journalist as long as we can remember.

So it’s quite surprising that she’s apparently never heard of Gordon Brown before.

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Since we’ve been talking about mad letters from Scottish Labour MPs today, we’re sharing this one with you too. We’ve been trying to make sense of it all evening.

We haven’t made any progress. It’s not just a simple accidental transposition of words, because if you switch “increased” and “decreased” around it’s still gibberish – why would the threat have decreased because of proliferation? If anyone can explain it, do drop us a line.

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Because there’s really no satire we can add to this magnificent zoomery:

So we might as well pop out to the shops for a bit.

With a knife-edge general election just 90-odd days away, we must confess ourselves surprised at the sudden rash of candour/indiscipline (depending on how generously you want to frame it) that’s broken out in Scottish Labour.

It started soon after the referendum, when Edinburgh Labour chairman Trevor Davies felt confident enough, with the vote won, to announce on an officially-backed Labour website that his primary loyalty was to his party rather than to the people of Scotland, under the startlingly blunt headline “Labour first, Scottish second”.

But any notion that the comments represented nothing more than a vainglorious and momentary slip from a loose cannon were soon dispelled.

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Ed Miliband, who is apparently the leader of the Labour Party, is in Scotland today to make some promises about his lifelong commitment to “Home Rule”, a policy which his MSPs were flatly denying ever mentioning earlier this month.

We’re sure he’ll be as good as his word.

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There’s been much discussion in the press lately about Jim Murphy’s plan to change the elusive Scottish Labour “constitution”, a document almost nobody has ever seen and which most people didn’t know even existed until a few weeks ago.

Naturally we were curious to have a wee look, so when we stumbled across a page on the Electoral Commission website which said it held copies of party constitutions and provided them on request, we thought we’d take a shot on the off-chance. We weren’t at all surprised by the reply:

“the Commission does not hold a constitution for the Scottish Labour Party per se, since they are not separately registered with us. The Labour Party is registered for GB as a whole.”

But then an alert reader asked the EC a smarter question.

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Let’s start with the obvious: nobody has a clue who’s going to win the 2015 general election. But almost without exception, commentators are saying that should Labour’s vote collapse in Scotland to the extent that current polling says it will, it will radically alter Ed Miliband’s chances of kicking David Cameron out of 10 Downing Street.

That’s a message that Labour are delighted to hear, because their entire Scottish electoral strategy/manifesto is the phrase “If you vote SNP the Tories will get back in”. Now, we already know that on the empirical level that’s complete cobblers – the Tories historically get in when the SNP vote is lowest.

But it could be fairly argued that those statistics are correlation rather than causation, isolated as they are from the rest of the UK’s results. So we decided to take a more detailed look at some of the possible scenarios from this May’s vote and see if the Nats really could let the Tories in.

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