For some unknown reason the BBC still hasn’t managed to get its coverage of the Scottish Labour conference from last Saturday onto the iPlayer yet. Fortunately an alert reader captured the second of its two-hour broadcasts and has helpfully put the whole thing on YouTube. Here’s a short clip.

We know that claim is a flat-out lie. We know that Jim Murphy knows it’s a flat-out lie. We’re pretty sure that Brian Taylor – who Murphy sneakily implicates in the falsehood by saying “You know this”, which Taylor fails to contest – knows it’s a flat-out lie. And we know that Jim Murphy knows that everyone knows that he knows it’s a flat-out lie.

So why, more than a month after it was comprehensively and unarguably disproven, is Scottish Labour still knowingly, deliberately, publicly lying to the people of Scotland?

It’s not isolated. It’s being repeated at every level of the party.

It’s being repeated on leaflets put through people’s doors.

It’s being repeated on social media.

All of these repetitions have come long after it was proven to be false and covered extensively in the press. Whenever challenged, Labour mumble irrelevancies about the past and duck behind some weasel words, but as soon as they’re off-camera they simply go back to the original version of the lie.

It’s a startling demonstration of just how utterly bereft of strategy the party is that it keeps insisting the Emperor is wearing a really rather splendid set of new robes when everyone else can see his tackle swinging in the breeze. In terms of sheer contempt for the intelligence of the electorate, we think it might be some sort of a record.