And another thing…

THE SUNDAY Herald’s hatred of the Labour Party is illustrated (again) this morning by this introductory paragraph in a story about the party’s ongoing election contest:

THE CIVIL war engulfing Labour about the powers of the Holyrood leader has opened a new front, with several MPs expressing total opposition to calls for more powers for the Scottish party.

Civil war, eh? Well, I expect there will be lots of “civil wars” in the next few weeks. There will be plenty of “civil wars” at each of the party conferences, including the SNP’s. There will be “civil wars” on the issues of the health service and education. There will probably be votes at the end of each “civil war”. And when parliament – as well as the Scottish Parliament – resumes, there will be lots of “civil wars” in the respective chambers.

The Sunday Herald would have been among the first to complain about the absence of a debate on the role and power of Labour’s leader at Holyrood. Now that we’re having that debate, they’re calling it a civil war. Is it because journalists who have never been involved in politics directly (other than offering support to their party of choice through their writing) just don’t understand? Do they genuinely believe that if there’s a debate within a party, then it has to be devisive? No, I didn’t think so.

Iain Dale reports today of an attempt by persons unknown to persuade him to write an entirely false posting about the imminent defection of a Labour MP to the SNP. To his credit, Iain checked out the story and, inevitably, it didn’t stand up. Less to his credit, he makes the assumption that this is an attempt by left wing bloggers to smear and discredit right-of-centre bloggers. Unfortunately, this is a theory that has been enthusiastically embraced by those commenting on the post.

But I can shed some light on this, because it is eerily reminiscent of a similar attempt to smear the Labour Party 18 months ago, when Paul Hutcheon, political editor of The Sunday Herald, wrote a front page splash announcing – guess what? – the imminent defection by a Labour MP to the SNP. No evidence was offered by Hutcheon to substantiate the story and he was unable to stand the story up. That didn’t prevent the editor splashing the non-story all over the front page, generating acres of speculation and suspicion (as was presumably the intention), not least in the Scottish blogosphere.

Inevitably, no defection occurred. Equally inevitably, neither Hutcheon nor The Sunday Herald offered any form of correction or apology. And as is the way with Scottish politics, Hutcheon was subsequently honoured as Scottish Political Journalist of the Year.

Someone did try to play you for a fool, Iain. But that “someone” is almost certainly not a Labour supporter; far more likely he is a Scottish nationalist hoping to gain advantage for his party in the Glasgow East by-election. And what does it tell you when a Tory blogger carries out more checks on a story in order to maintain his own credibility than does a full-time journalist for a Scottish Sunday newspaper?