Wings Over Scotland

A couple of things we’ve sent off this morning in relation to this.

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Below is a letter from the editor of the Daily Record sent to a Wings reader yesterday (and, we presume, to many others). We thought you might find it interesting.

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Just for fun, we thought you might like to see a list of the Scottish Labour MPs, MSPs and MEPs who are eligible to nominate a candidate for the leadership and deputy leadership positions, but have declined to endorse anyone for either.

If you wouldn’t, don’t look below, whatever you do.

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We thought you might be interested to see some of the working of this post from yesterday. Of the 2.4m votes cast in Scotland in the 2010 UK general election, not far short of a million – if a recent YouGov poll is to be believed – are currently likely to be cast for different parties in 2015. And it’s intriguing to see where they’ll go.

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Keen followers of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish Labour, have in recent days found themselves experiencing something of a deja vu overload. Leadership contender Jim Murphy has been all over the media recycling apologies and pledges of reform dating back up to seven years from previous leaders.

But this morning readers could be forgiven for finding themselves a little confused.

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Wendy Alexander, 2007:

“It is a journey that I am determined will end with Scottish Labour back in power at Holyrood.

To get there we must win back the trust of the Scottish people. And to win that trust we must listen to them and show that we have listened to them by reforming our party.

We will not stand by and let the SNP fail the people of Scotland by ducking their real responsibilities of government because of their obsession with independence.

That is our job and we will do it to the best of our ability. But we will not be aggressive for the sake of it. We will be constructive in opposition, and we will give credit where it is due.”

So: listen, reform, don’t just bash the Nats. Got it. How hard can it be?

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Some SNP supporters have – rightly, in this site’s view – called for calm and caution over this week’s opinion polls, showing the Nats at stratospheric support levels and, supposedly, on course to win either 54 or 47 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats next May. Given the huge gaps that the SNP would have to close in order to take each individual seat, those numbers seem extremely optimistic to anyone familiar with First Past The Post, even given Scottish Labour’s ongoing implosion.

So rather than rely on dodgy uniform-swing predictors, we thought we’d try something a bit simpler but also more scientific and likely to come up with a believable result.

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There’ll be some more psephology coming up on Wings next week, readers, so we thought we’d get prepared by having a delve around in the inner workings of this week’s YouGov findings and seeing if we could find a few interesting nuggets.

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To his credit, Ed Miliband seems to have noticed that his party is crumbling beneath his feet. The rot is spreading down from Scotland, and Labour’s vote in Rochester & Strood – a seat it held, with slightly different boundaries, as recently as 2010 – has plummeted to just 16% despite voters in the constituency naming the NHS (usually Labour’s strongest field) as their top priority.

And when modern-day Labour panics, it reaches for a little hammer and smashes the glass on a box marked “IN CASE OF ABSOLUTE EMERGENCY TRY SOCIALISM”, in which it keeps a very old, moth-eaten piece of paper titled “House of Lords reform”.

So today Miliband suddenly pulled what seems to be a brand-new box-fresh policy out of – well, let’s be polite and say “the ether”.

The Lords is to be abolished, we’re told, and replaced with a new elected “Senate”, which will conveniently also serve as some  form of regional devolution, though its specific responsibilities and powers have – readers will doubtless be quite astonished to hear – not been laid out.

Mr Miliband’s only problem will be getting anyone to believe it.

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Sometimes, readers, analysis is simply unnecessary, because the news speaks for itself. We’re not just saying that because it’s a lovely sunny day outside in unseasonal t-shirt temperatures, either, because it’s difficult to think of what needs to be added to a polling result saying that – far from being sick of the whole issue after three years of constitutional debate – a three-to-two majority of Scots would welcome a second independence referendum within just FIVE years, and a two-to-one majority would be happy to have one within a decade.

When you add in the findings of a completely different poll which revealed that were the referendum tomorrow Scotland would vote Yes by 52-48 (a huge 7% swing in as many weeks), it doesn’t take much in the way of professional insight to deduce the mood of the nation, particularly in the context of pro-independence parties having trebled their membership while the hollowed-out shell of Scottish Labour implodes and a panicking media tries frantically to anoint Jim Murphy – Jim Murphy – as its saviour.

So we’re off to the park for a bit.

It’s been impossible to know where to start today. Last night hundreds of angry protestors picketed a £200-a-seat banquet in Glasgow at which Scottish Labour “showcase[d] the party in front of donors and business figures” in a desperate bid to raise cash for the branch office (which survives on handouts from the UK party), and at which deputy leader Anas Sarwar, less than 48 hours after vowing he’d remain in his position, announced that he’d step down after all.

Despite being the deputy, Sarwar wasn’t stepping down to contest the leadership, but rather to smooth the path of Jim Murphy. Murphy is London’s preferred candidate, but even Labour aren’t dim enough to want to run Holyrood with London-based MPs in BOTH of the leadership roles, so Sarwar pulled a swift U-turn to offer a potential “dream ticket” of Murphy and Kezia Dugdale, a Lothians list MSP who this week told the Edinburgh Evening News that she intends to leave politics within 10 years.

(Then again, in 2011 Jim Murphy told Labour List he wouldn’t consider running for Scottish leader for “maybe 20 years” and he’s only waited three, so who knows?)

But there’s so much more going on.

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