Wings Over Scotland

Keen students of politics can’t have failed to notice a fascinating situation coalescing in the last few months. On current polling, it looks very much like no two of the UK’s four constituent nations will vote for the same party at the forthcoming general election. The Tories are miles ahead in England, in Scotland the SNP lead by even more, Wales is still a Labour stronghold and Northern Ireland continues to do its own thing, split roughly half-and-half along, well, let’s call them “cultural” lines.

So when we decided to conduct another poll with our left-over fundraiser money (start saving now for 2015’s annual grand appeal next month, readers!), we thought it might be interesting to do something that we’re not sure has ever been done before.

We commissioned TWO full-sample polls, one of 1000 people in Scotland and one of 1000 people in the rest of the UK, and we asked them the same questions.

The results we got were fascinating – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, sometimes pleasing and sometimes dismaying. But we’re going to start off with one we really didn’t see coming at all.

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Alert readers will know that we very often like to bring to your attention both Scottish Labour’s fondness for radically rewriting history and its frequent struggles with basic counting. Today, though, the North British branch office has spectacularly outdone itself and managed to pull off both at once. This is going to be hard to beat.

Above is an extract from the official record of today’s proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. And we can only applaud Rhoda Grant’s ambition.

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An alert reader pointed us today to this audio clip of Jim Murphy. It’s not tagged, but we THINK it’s from a Radio Clyde interview about three weeks ago which oddly didn’t seem to get picked up at the time by anyone in the media.

It’s an interesting viewpoint.

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We note with interest that the remarkable “I am not and have never been a Unionist” article about Jim Murphy, which vanished last night from the Daily Record website for several hours, has reappeared today. As far as we can see at a glance it’s the same as the original version with one slight alteration.

We’re not sure that was worth all the effort, lads. For most Scots, including a great many in the Labour Party, those are two interchangeable terms.

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In a publishing environment where newspaper sales right across both Scotland and the UK have been suffering an unbroken decline for several years, the news that the Sunday Herald – the only newspaper to declare support for independence before the referendum – actually managed to INCREASE its sales in 2014 by a whopping 31% after coming out for Yes is a striking story.

Here’s the headline the BBC chose to cover it under this morning.

Seems legit.

Jim Murphy didn’t turn up at Westminster today to vote with the Tories for £30bn of austerity cuts, like 28 of his Scottish Labour colleagues did. That’s because he was taking some Scottish journalists to lunch to explain an important thing to them.

We’ve been sat staring at a blank paragraph for the last 10 minutes trying to think of something satirical to say. We’ve got nothing, readers.

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Willie Rennie, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, 12 January 2015:

“Mr Rennie said the [SNP] consistently changed its tune on what elections were about after the event and could use May’s poll to claim a mandate justifying a UK vote.”

Tavish Scott, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Tuesday 3 May 2011:

“If you want independence you can vote for it on Thursday.”

Still, at least he was wrong about Salmond fiddling the referendum result, eh?

Ever since the referendum, we’ve documented the various ways in which Unionists have constantly tried to rewrite history and inflate the magnitude of their victory.

We had Alistair Darling saying before the vote that 60-40 would have been too close for comfort, but then his team attempting to portray 55-45 as a resounding win, and we had the Labour peer Baroness Liddell try to claim the real result was 67-33 based on a near-Stalinist approach to voter attribution.

And yesterday, bless his heart, No campaign mascot Wee Willie Rennie had a go.

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Followers of our Twitter account will know that we’ve highlighted on many occasions since September the bizarrely angry attitude of much of the victorious side in the independence referendum. Despite having won, commentators and activists on the No side have undertaken a series of bitter and miserable articles and rants seemingly less than delighted at having come first in a two-horse race.

We’ve been a bit of a loss to work out why. They may have only cleared the bar by 5%, but it’s a reasonably comfortable margin if not exactly an easy cruise over the finishing line (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor). And embarrassingly we needed some help from one of the thicker sub-species of BritNat troll to finally work it out.

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It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.

Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?

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Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, were greatly preoccupied in the days after the referendum with the thought that greater devolution to Holyrood could lead to Scottish MPs at Westminster becoming “second-class” members, should the move lead to restrictions on their voting rights in the Commons.

As yet we don’t know what will become of the drive for “English votes for English laws”. But it’s something of a moot point, because we know that as far as politics (and much else, but we’ll get to football another day) goes, Scots are second-class citizens in the UK already.

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The Scottish media has been predictably full of Sincere Jim Murphy’s proclamation this weekend that Scottish Labour is “a renewed party for a post-referendum era in Scottish politics. I want Yes and No voters alike to be able to look at the purpose and principles of the Scottish Labour party and find a home there.”

This is Labour’s 2015 general election candidate for the Western Isles seat.

Should we bother compiling a big list of similar “separatists are the filthiest scum of the Earth” quotes from other Scottish Labour MPs who are standing for election this May, or should we just consider the point made and move on, readers?