THIS week the usual pile of keech dropped through my letter box.
Aside from a couple of bills most was junk mail - a DIY catalogue, a new Chinese restaurant offering a takeaway service, and a couple of what were obviously election communications.
The Labour one was big and red and shouty, offering ten reasons to vote for the People's Party, which is apparently the only party which "can stop the Tories." This repeated the constitutional solecism about the largest party at Westminster being the only one able to form a Government, as opposed to the one able to command a majority in the House.
The red paper opened up into a useful poster-sized list of Jim Murphy's greatest hits since becoming branch office party leader, headed by his pledge to use the mansion tax takings in London to employ 1000 more nurses in Scotland, no matter how many nurses we already have or actually need, or indeed the way in which this is even an issue for a UK General Election.
The rest of the top ten is drawn from Labour pronouncements at Westminster and Mr Murphy's impressive ball skills up here. The result is a kind of Gatling Gun approach to policy making where political strategy and positioning take precedence over joined-up thinking.
Clinton strategists invented triangulation, pitching policies midway between those of your opponents to cut off their ground, and Tony Blair made it an art form. His one-time chief of staff, John McTernan is now working for Mr Murphy. But now their policies are so scatter-gun that they cease to be meaningful, and we are left with a kind of Bermudan Triangulation where positioning and strategy are everything and nothing else matters.
Pondering the big red Scottish Labour leaflet, printed in Essex on paper from responsible sources and delivered by Royal Mail in the absence of party activists, I turned to the next election communication, entitled "Scotland's Changing".
Boy, did the front cover tick all the boxes. Half a dozen photos gave us a gorgeous blond mum and newborn baby, a healthy older couple in country attire, a fashion shot with a black lady and a random photo of an Asian man. There were even two red-headed young women, so every diversity box was ticked. I say this as a one-time ginger.
The political party imprint on this blatant election material? "HM Government". No doubt the stated intention of the eight-page leaflet will be "public service information" to explain the proposed settlement after the Smith Commission agreement. But the real intention is crystal clear. It screams: "Vote for anyone except the SNP."
How do I adduce this? The text, a creepy political mantra about how fantastic the new devolution settlement is going to be. You may agree or disagree with the thesis, but this leaflet reads like a Better Together production and should not being going out two months ahead of the General Election paid for by my taxes.
It dragoons "all five of Scotland's major political parties" into the mix, before heading off into territory which will anger at least two of them, as it talks about the advantages of the UK's large economy, the pound, pensions, and passports. "A stronger Parliament. A united future. Built to last," it repeatedly says in the cadences of the conference speech.
"Whatever your age and wherever you live, being part of the United Kingdom means we pool and share our resources," it states, in what I am certain is a straight lift from some of the speeches made by former Labour Premier Gordon Brown during the endgame of the referendum campaign.
So a leaflet sent out by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition quotes its Labour allies from the happy days of the Better Together campaign. It's a Better Together leaflet writ large. If they wanted to do that they should have gone to a disgraced banker or oil trader and got the cash to fund it, but no, in this case they produced it using £1.5m of taxpayer's money which I don't remember agreeing to.
The worst thing about all this? It's not just immoral, it's wrong-headed. This leaflet re-runs the referendum campaign at a time when the Westminster Government ought to be seeking to turn our focus back to solid General Election issues. It's the SNP who want to keep the momentum of the Yes campaign going. Why is the UK Government spending £1.5m of my money and yours to do the same? Their stupidity and arrogance is astounding
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