The SNP media team has named Baroness Jay as the person who may be the unnamed source featured in The Herald’s front page splash story of 13th February, inadvertently betraying the possibility of a frightfully dishonest attempt by The Herald to offer an concocted escape clause to the Scottish Government in the aftermath of the currency union debacle.
The 13th February edition of The Herald had a front page emblazoned with the headline ‘Yes does not mean Yes’, with the strapline below: ‘Senior Coalition member issues independence warning as Osborne rejects currency union’.
Margaret Jay is a Labour life peer and a former Labour opposition whip in the House of Lords.
It would be interesting to know quite how The Herald can defend its description of her as a ‘senior coalition member’ – or give a clearer identification of their source, if they claim it was someone else..
For Argyll accurately identified this excursion of The Herald’s as a decoy designed to assist the Scottish Government in deflecting attention the day after Chancellor George Osborne, Ed Balls and Danny Alexander made it public that no UK government of any political colour could, on monetary policy grounds, sanction a currency union with an independent Scotland.
Our reason for spotting the decoy tactic was the unusual coyness of The Herald even in identifying the role of its unnamed source. We said that the description made it clear that this ‘senior coalition source’ could not be a member of government and might not even be an MP. It never occurred to us that the truth could be that the source had nothing whatsoever to do with the coalition itself.
The revelation of Baroness Jay’s name was coincidentally contained in an SNP press release of yesterday, ramping up the concoction of UK government bad faith on the back of a casual remark by a faded Labour peer whose elevation was always dynastic nepotism rather then merited. Yesterday’s Sunday Post carried the story also identifying Jay but not naming her as a ‘senior coalition source’.
Dr Margaret Jay is Labour party ‘royalty’ from the bad old days, the daughter of Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan under whose aegis was the infamous 1978 Winter of Discontent, riddled with strikes against the pay restraints imposed to try to bring runaway national debt under control.These were the days when the IMF was all over the UK, wagging fingers in the way it wags them at Greece today.
Callaghan’s government then saw the defeat of the referendum on devolution for Scotland, where a Yes vote failed to make the 40% baseline, followed by a successful motion of no confidence on 28 March 1979. The ensuing general election was won by Margaret Thatcher, with Labour out of power for 18 years.
Callaghan’s daughter Margaret, then married to Peter Jay, the economist son of another former Labour Cabinet Minster, Douglas Jay was made a life peer in July 1992, as Baroness Jay of Paddington, and was opposition Whip in the House of Lords. The ‘opposition’ in question was to the Conservative government of the day.
