The hope of the wow

Who needs the Vow when we’ve got wow? We’ve not only got wow, we’ve got utter gorgeousness. Eat yer heart out George Galloway. A couple of opinion polls were published on Monday, one a proper actual opinion poll of voters in Scotland with a representative sample and everything. The other was possibly somewhat less scientific, being an online poll of horny Edinburgh gay guys looking for a shag on Grindr.

This is of course tautological, as being on Grindr means that you are by definition a horny gay guy looking for a shag. And these days it’s also getting tautological to state that opinion polls of Scottish voting intentions show that Labour has been totally screwed, nailed to the wall, whammed, bammed and no thank you jam. The poll discovered that 62% of horny gay guys in Edinburgh plan to vote SNP. Proof, as if any proof was needed, that voting SNP means you get sexy, and that the SNP has got the gay vote pretty much in a glamorous clutch bag.

Grindr, for those of you of a shy and retiring heterosexual disposition, is an app for gay men who are looking for a random shag. It doesn’t tend to be used by men who are looking to settle down and get a labrador together. Most guys who use Grindr claim to have unfeasibly large wullies, because profiles on Grindr are about as accurate as Labour party manifesto promises and likewise invariably end in disappointment.

The guy who carried out the poll did a similar poll just before the independence referendum, and got a result which was pretty much spot on in terms of the actual vote. Which only goes to show that horny gay guys are more representative of the population at large than UKIP would care to admit.

The proper poll, carried out for TNS, showed that the SNP currently has the support of 54% of Scotland’s voters. On these figures, and given a uniform national swing, Labour will be left with just one seat in Scotland. Which would mean that Wee Wullie Bain would be Secretary of State for Scotland in a Miliband government because he’d be the only Labour MP left.

Unfortunately for Wee Wullie, the only certain thing about a universal national swing is that it’s entirely mythical. Swings are never uniform, and the swing to the SNP looks like it’s much stronger in the Glasgow area, where some figures suggest the SNP could hoover up 60% of the vote. So Wee Wullie would be out on his ear too. I recently spent some time with Anne McLaughlin, the SNP candidate in Glasgow East, interviewing her for an article for Newsnet Scotland – and it’s fair to say that Wee Wullie doesn’t look like he’s got very many fans on Grindr. This is despite the fact that Labour really does have an unfeasibly large dick in the shape of Jim Murphy.

Jim is now bereft of ideas. He’s tried to bombard us with promises of jam. Whatever happened to the Vow Plus? Gordie gets trotted out with alarming regularity to vow things that get quietly forgotten about a few days later when they’ve been slapped down by the Labour leadership in London. Over the weekend the promise to give a wee bit of jam – quite literally – to food banks in Scotland evaporated like spilt milk in the sunshine, leaving nothing behind but a stain and a bad smell. And the promise to abolish “exploitative” zero hours contracts collapsed in the contradiction of a Labour council which employs 2000 workers on zero hours contracts. So they’re not exploitative when Labour uses them. Labour is the party of do as I say not do as I do. They are out of ideas, out of inspiration, out of hope. Labour is the no-trick pony. They’re just pony.

But it doesn’t matter any more when no one trusts a word you say, and that’s Jim’s real problem, and because of that fact he’s staring an extinction level event in the face. There’s an asteroid on a collision course with the Labour party in Scotland, and the only defence Jim has got left is a tattered umbrella saying SNP bad. The dinosaur complains about the shortcomings of mammals as the fireball lights up the sky.

Jim was at it again today, standing beside Ed Balls and repeating SNP bad to a small audience of Labour activists and press representatives. And this is another example of tautology because Labour never has any other kind of audience these days. If Jim Murphy or Gordie Broon ever did give a speech to an audience of ordinary non-party affiliated Scottish people that really would be news. But that’s as likely to happen as a horny gay guy on Grindr being honest about the size of his wullie.

A part of me weeps that it has come to this. Labour is the junkie child, a product of Scottish communities. But Labour is a part of the family who has gone bad. The only recourse remaining is to kick the badjin out and let it fend for itself without sooking off expenses accounts, because otherwise it just keeps hurting us, it keeps sticking in the knife and turning it. And Labour does that because it takes us for granted like it always has done. Even now, on the edge of extinction it can’t believe that it won’t be forgiven and all its sins forgotten. It’s not like we’ve not given it fair warning. It’s not like we’ve not given it chances, but Labour keeps nicking the cash from our purses and the faith from our hearts. It’s beyond redemption.

Last year the independence referendum showed voters in Scotland that we can still hope of things getting better. We can still hope that our voices will be heard and our opinions count. That is what this election is about for Scotland, hope. We’ve learned how to hope and we’re not going to squander it on Labour’s Grindr profile. Hope is what is driving the opinion polls, but Project Fear is determined to put us back in our shortbread tin. Jim had pinned all his hopes on a late swing, and there is a late swing, it’s just not in the direction Jim was hoping for.

This time it isn’t going to work – there is an army of us spreading the message that hope still lives. We need to keep up the pressure, but we’re in for a rocky ride over the next few days. Let’s keep working, let’s keep hope alive. We’ve got the hope of the wow.

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