Wings Over Scotland

You might not think it, readers, but even after all this time we’re still capable of a certain degree of innocent, naive trust in Scottish journalism.

When Nicola Sturgeon didn’t just issue a boilerplate condemnation at FMQs yesterday after ludicrously overblown allegations of Twitter “trolling” by an SNP candidate, but went on the counter-attack over Labour’s grotesquely abusive Ian Smart, we foolishly thought that might make both sides of the story newsworthy.

And then we opened the papers.

We don’t expect the media to be impartial. But let there today officially be an end to even the slightest pretence that it’s at least fair, professional and honest.

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Impressive as it is in a party with Jackie Baillie in it, Kezia Dugdale has carved out quite a reputation in Scottish Labour as a specialist in making categorical statements of facts which turn out not to be true. So we were naturally sceptical when she claimed on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland that Stewart Hosie of the SNP hadn’t said whether a commitment to a second independence referendum would be in tomorrow’s SNP manifesto.

We thought that he had, and so did presenter Gordon Brewer, but Dugdale was most adamant – “I listened VERY carefully, very carefully indeed” –  that he’d “dodged and dived” on the matter, and spent more than a minute of her interview saying so.

So we went back and checked, because that’s what we do.

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You’d have to say this seems pretty clear.

(From today’s Daily Politics, around 28m in.)

…we shall say zees only wance.

That clip (from just past midnight on the BBC News channel) isn’t a bad starting-point summary of last night’s extraordinary story, except by our count the Telegraph’s piece was fourth-hand rather than third-hand.

(First-hand would have been Nicola Sturgeon. Second-hand would have been the ambassador. Third-hand would have been the consul-general. The civil servant – who doubted the story him/herself – is fourth-hand.)

This is also a pretty good primer. Now let’s get to the fun stuff.

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Like some sort of out-of-control, unstoppable lying machine, Scottish Labour keep telling the electorate that the party with the most seats in a hung parliament is the one that forms the government, and that the only way to prevent the Conservatives from returning to power is for Labour to be the biggest party.

They’ve been saying it for weeks. They say it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, almost as if it’s all they’ve got.

The trouble is that an awful lot of people seem to disagree with them.

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We’re going to compile all of these onto a single page soon, because as you can see, Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop telling this lie.

Today’s expert saying “Does it, aye?” (and the latest in a long and distinguished line) is Peter Riddell from the Institute For Government, speaking on Radio 4’s “World At One” this afternoon (from 35m).

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As readers will know, when professional broadcast journalists can’t or won’t do their jobs properly, we’re not above jumping in ourselves.

So when someone tweeted to tell us that Jim Murphy had just started a phone-in on London station LBC, it seemed an ideal opportunity to quickly ring up and try directly asking him the question that Scottish Labour really, really don’t want to answer.

Here’s what happened.

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We’ve just had a fascinating email from Scottish Labour forwarded to us, from a concerned reader who’d written to them to ask if Labour would really refuse to form a government if they weren’t the largest party. The answer might not be the one anyone who’s seen the party’s election literature (below) would be expecting.

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We have to give Jim Murphy credit – on this week’s Sunday Politics he started off with the subtle, misleading but technically-accurate version of Labour’s line about the “biggest party forming the government”, which involves making the true but irrelevant observation that in the past it’s usually been the case. (Mainly because UK elections almost always give the biggest party a comfortable majority.)

But it only took a couple of minutes of questioning for the Scottish branch manager to lose his cool and resort to the comprehensively debunked flat-out lie again.

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If we’re honest, readers, we almost never bother with BBC Scotland’s televised political coverage any more. We suspect the viewing figures for Scotland 2015 are down to fingers-and-toes territory now, and if last night’s edition – which we gritted our teeth and watched after noting the incredulous response on social media – is anything to go by, the state broadcaster is now using it to try out work-experience kids.

But we can cut fresh-faced new boy David Henderson (who suffered the indignity of being billed as Sarah Smith) a bit of slack for being outmanoeuvred by an experienced operator like Jim Murphy, who at one point in the show was actually interrogating the presenter rather than the other way round.

Kirsty Wark, regular anchor on the Corporation’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight, on the other hand, has no such excuses whatsoever.

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Alert readers will have to decide for themselves whether bravado or sheer desperation is to blame, but Scottish Labour just can’t seem to stop themselves from lying to the people of Scotland about the formation of the next government.

Mindbogglingly, the party has just released a video in which Jim Murphy repeats the lie again, and in today’s Daily Record its Ayrshire candidate Sandra Osborne openly admits that “We are talking to people on the doorstep explaining that whoever ends up the biggest party after the election will form the next government”, despite it having been proved beyond the tiniest shred of dispute that that’s simply not true.

Fortunately, reinforcements have arrived.

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For some unknown reason the BBC still hasn’t managed to get its coverage of the Scottish Labour conference from last Saturday onto the iPlayer yet. Fortunately an alert reader captured the second of its two-hour broadcasts and has helpfully put the whole thing on YouTube. Here’s a short clip.

We know that claim is a flat-out lie. We know that Jim Murphy knows it’s a flat-out lie. We’re pretty sure that Brian Taylor – who Murphy sneakily implicates in the falsehood by saying “You know this”, which Taylor fails to contest – knows it’s a flat-out lie. And we know that Jim Murphy knows that everyone knows that he knows it’s a flat-out lie.

So why, more than a month after it was comprehensively and unarguably disproven, is Scottish Labour still knowingly, deliberately, publicly lying to the people of Scotland?

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