Email to Sneer Murphy.

Email to the right unhonourable Jim Murphy MP

Dear Jim

I would congratulate you on managing to hold your seat in the election yesterday, but the lack of grace you showed afterwards stops me from doing so.

I watched your little rant on BBC1 last night. I won't pretend that I'm not an SNP voter, and as such you'll probably think I'm biased or just plain wrong; but the fact is what you said was an utter disgrace, and you made a complete embarrassment of yourself. I'm ashamed that we have people like you representing us. After lying for the whole election that only a Labour victory would secure Scotland against the Tories, and thus making the SNP an irrelevance, I was amazed to see you suddenly launching into a vitriolic attack against the democratically elected Scottish Government, which suggested they were not the irrelevance you liked to pretend they were. I'm not at all surprised when you spout your ill-informed opinions about how well the SNP administration has performed in Scotland, and to be honest you're perfectly entitled to your opinions; but your assertions that the SNP had gone backwards was nothing but an absolute lie.

Let's look at the results, shall we?
Labour: no gains, no losses, voter percentage increase of 2.5%.
SNP: no gains, no losses, voter percentage increase of 2.3%.

Hmmm... looks pretty similar to me. If your idea of "backwards" is to return the exact same number of seats as last time, and to increase vote share by over 2%, then it would seem every party in Scotland is going backwards. There's an interesting discussion there of course, about how your party's negative campaign tactics are keeping Scotland back, but you won't listen to it, so I won't bother trying.

Alex Salmond is to be commended for ignoring the petulant remarks by people like you and Douglas Alexander, and instead extending a hand to the Labour party. He does this because the SNP truly do care about Scotland - if they were the self-serving party you always claim them to be, he'd be on the phone to David Cameron right now. But as we now know, that is never going to happen.

I'll say it again: you're an utter disgrace.

Incidentally, as neither the leader of the Labour party nor the Scottish Labour party, what were you doing on the Scottish Leaders Debate last week? Gordon and Iain too busy were they?

Yours sincerely

Douglas Daniel of AlbaMatters blog not me.