Salmond on Marr, Soubry on Salmond, Murphy in meltdown – just another day in Scotland-dominated UK politics!

SNP membership hits 100,000, polls couldn’t be better or more consistent – and Scottish politics seem so human, vibrant, cutting edge - and Westminster politics so tired, so contemptibly predictable, locked in the past.

Anna Soubry MP   does a fine archetypal Tory woman impression of Ann Widdecombe in full expostulating, "end-of-Britain-as-we-know-it" mode.

I must give Anna full credit - she does synthetic indignation body language better than anyone littering the Tory benches today.

 

Stuffed full of John McTernan soundbytes, Jim Murphy falls apart under Andrew Neil's relentless professionalism - and the cold, hard facts of the polls.

Defensive, misjudging speed of delivery, lurching in typical fashion from Scottish Labour backroom brawler mode to cloying attempts to ingratiate - all in all, Murphy's painful swansong.

Scotland and NATO – a US view. The questions and contradictions that just won’t go away …

This is a right-wing Republican argument - but - who knows when the US will have another right-wing republican president? In less than four years? And who knows exactly what Obama and the Democrats think of Scotland and NATO?

The essence of the argument is all here - it contains all the contradictions inherent within the SNP's hotly-debated policy shift last October. They weren't successfully addressed or answered then - and Angus Robertson did not successfully address them in the debate that immediately followed this. Jim Murphy was of course in his usual backroom Glasgow political brawler mode, and betrayed all the intellectual poverty and hypocrisy at the heart of the Labour position.

Only independence - and an election in 2016 for a truly independent Scottish Parliament - will resolve these matters.

Since the Scottish Labour Party that contests that election will be a very different beast to its present expedient, power, money-grubbing and militaristic incarnation, who knows what the outcome of the 2016 election will be? The same will be true to a lesser degree of the LibDems. The Tories will still be Tories ...

Jim Murphy looks foolish on who leads for Labour on the Union – “BBC will pick the Labour Leader for the referendum debate”

Even by Murphys' standards, this was a bummer. "The BBC will pick the Labour Leader for the referendum debate" Goad help us a' ...

His persona, one of slimy charm coupled uneasily with old-guard Scottish Labour bluster fails miserably, as it did in the lead-up to Scottish Labour's 2011 disaster at the polls. I wish he would lead the anti-independence campaign.

Some media commentators refer to Murphy as a Labour 'big beast'. He reminds me of the sad, mangy lion in the old Wilson’s Oswald Street Zoo in Glasgow when I was a child. Wilson's Zoo

Big beast my ****. I almost prefer the unctuous, pompous Douglas Alexander. At least wee Dougie has some intellectual candlepower flaming between his ears.