The call yourself whatever you like party.

I received a Scottish Labour campaign leaflet through my door this afternoon; I picked it up with an uncontrollable groan as I cast my eyes across more empty rhetoric on our supposed NHS crisis.  NHS crisis klaxon is the new oil is running out klaxon, just in case you didn’t know.

I was just about to crumple it up and chuck it in the recycling bin when the imprint caught my eye:

“Promoted by Brian Roy, Scottish General Secretary, on behalf of the Scottish Labour Party…”

Wait, what?  That can’t be right, surely?

We all know there is no such thing as the Scottish Labour Party, it’s an accounting unit of UK Labour blah blah; I know, I know, no seriously I know, stop it.

I already covered in my last blog post how Jim Murphy had been leading the Scottish electorate in the merry dance of pretending that by voting for Labour’s Scottish MPs in May it would somehow enable them to enact upon devolved issues which are the responsibility of the SNP-led Scottish Government, but now it seems as though Jim Murphy is trying to deceive us into believing that Scottish Labour are an actual party separate to that of Ed Miliband’s.

Let me just say with absolute clarity, they are not a separate party.  They are one and the same.  Every single one of Labour’s Scottish MPs standing for election is standing for Ed Miliband’s party, not Jim Murphy’s branch office.

If by some holy miracle Jim Murphy is elected and leads what is left of Labour’s Scottish MPs down to Westminster, they will be faced with the choice of toeing Ed Miliband’s party line, or acting as parliamentary rebels.

There is no separate platform.  There are no separate policies.  There is one leader of Labour who gets to choose the agenda for Scotland at this general election and his name isn’t Jim Murphy.

Remember that the next time Jim Murphy claims he doesn’t need Ed Miliband’s approval, because unless Jim is planning on creating his own wee independent parliament with just him and Labour’s Scottish MPs and telling Miliband to do one, he doesn’t really have much choice in the matter.

Perhaps the SNP could start putting “The We Aren’t Tied To A UK Master Scottish National Party” on all of their general election campaign material, since it would appear that you can just call yourself whatever you like regardless of whether or not you’re a registered party with that name.

Now for yet another ScotLab fail:

It would appear that proofreading, along with table reading and understanding simple figures, isn’t their forte either.

This was rather embarrassingly found at the bottom of several pages in Labour’s Scottish Conference exhibition sales guide.  Oops!