Wings Over Scotland

One of the weirdest things about UKIP’s spectacular success in the English local elections yesterday – up from EIGHT seats to 147 – was watching everyone in the unholy “Better Together” alliance desperately trying to downplay it.

From the Labour side came the traditional cry of “It’s ridiculous to separate Scotland from England just because you don’t like who England votes for (and therefore imposes on Scotland)!”, while Tories pointed out that they’d still retained almost 80% of their seats and that anyway it didn’t really matter, because UKIP had no chance of winning a general election and indeed still didn’t have a single MP.

Of course, as we’ve noted already today, they don’t actually need one.

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This is her own agent calling it “apt”, not us, okay?

We’ll be watching avidly to see what her “did it really happen or not?” story is.

This shouldn’t take long. Since 1997, and particularly since 2001, what passes for the political ideology of the Labour Party in Britain could be accurately summed up in one short phrase: be the smallest possible single step to the left of the Tories.

Protected by the grossly undemocratic First Past The Post electoral system – which discriminates massively against third parties and ensures that Labour or the Tories can secure huge, unassailable majorities on barely more than a third of the vote – Tony Blair’s brilliant, ruinous flash of political inspiration was the willingness to fully grasp the implication of that fact: that Labour could effectively all but become the Tories and still capture the left-wing vote, because that vote had nowhere else to go.

A bit like when there’s someone breathing right down your neck on a crowded train, that sent the Tories shuffling ever further along the political spectrum in an attempt to put some distance between them and their opponents, only to be confounded as Labour doggedly matched them step for step, constantly pressing their manifesto-groins into the Tories’ rear like some sort of hideous nerdy sex pest.

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Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones yesterday:

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones today:

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We don’t really want to spend all day discussing things from a single rapidly-declining minority-interest Unionist newspaper, but we spent 69p this morning buying a copy of the Scotsman in order to check some facts on the Susan Calman story, so we’re going to flipping well get our money’s worth.

The paper runs a rather odd piece today, in which the Labour-linked Centre for Public Policy for Regions is called upon to analyse a single Yes Scotland press release relating to the Scottish economy. (A boxout at the end promises a similar treatment for a “Better Together” leaflet at an unspecified point in the future.)

We’ve screenshotted the entire piece here if you want to read it without giving the Scotsman any traffic. But just to give you the flavour of the overarching (or underlying, depending on how you like to look at it) tone, below we’ve stripped out everything except the CPPR’s considered professional assessment.

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The “Calmangate” story just keeps getting stranger and stranger. A few hours after our piece earlier today noting that the Scotsman had overwritten their article alleging the comedian had suffered death threats and a “barrage of abuse” with a completely new one, a version of the original reappeared at its original address.

Its temporary absence was (ostensibly) explained by a post in the comments:

“Required for legal reasons”? Hmm, let’s see.

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We weren’t exactly shocked to see the Scotsman still trying to flog the “evil cybernats” routine this morning with another story about Susan Calman, with the paper seizing on some comments from Fiona Hyslop as their excuse to keep the issue alive.

Today’s article, though, is noticeably more restrained than yesterday’s. It’s liberally sprinkled with disclaimers and caveats noting that the threats and abuse had been alleged, rather than reporting them as empirical facts. It even notes that Ms Calman has declined to comment further on the supposed events, implying that there were questions to be answered.

Then we got to the comments, and things started to get a bit weird.

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Our mole at "Better Together" HQ leaks another upcoming poster.

Great work, Anas "Agent X"!

Wait, what now? From BBC News:

Several weeks on, we still await answers from the No camp to several serious questions about their biggest donor, Ian Taylor of Vitol. But the ongoing furore (we’re really not sure issuing the Herald with a legal threat worked out the way Mr Taylor hoped it would) over his £500,000 donation has kept attention away from the other substantial contributors to the “Better Together” campaign fund.

Aberdeen local paper the Evening Express has decided to put that right, though.

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Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.

That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.