Alert readers will recall that earlier today we conducted one of our regular context checks for statistics misleadingly-incompletely reported in the Scottish press. But while those are like shooting fish in a barrel, there’s one thing that’s an even more reliable open goal for the website editor looking for content in a slow news week.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again we give you… Scottish Labour.

There’s absolutely nothing that happens in Scotland that Scottish Labour are happy with. Day in and day out they can be found putting the bleakest possible spin on any statistic for a dwindling audience of diehard supporters and Scottish journalists.

Something bad happened? SCOTLAND IS TERRIBLE AND IT’S ALL THE SNP’S FAULT. Something good happened? IT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH AND IT’S ALL THE SNP’S FAULT. And the solution is always the same: let Labour run things.

There’s only one problem with that theory: it’s been tried.

Labour have run the Welsh Government ever since devolution 20 years ago – despite being proportionally elected, the current administration has 12 Labour ministers and deputies out of 14 – and without exception the Assembly in Cardiff has delivered worse (often spectacularly worse) results than its SNP-run counterpart since 2007.

The equivalent Welsh measure for operations cancelled for non-clinical reasons (what Scottish Labour describe as because “hospitals couldn’t cope”) is 75,000 in two years. That’s 37,500 a year, compared to the Scottish figure of 8,311.

And if we adjust those numbers pro-rata to account for Wales being a significantly smaller country than Scotland (with just 58% of the population), we get these figures:

NON-CLINICAL OPERATION CANCELLATIONS (per year)

Scotland: 8,311

Wales: 64,113

The Welsh figures under Labour are a breathtaking 771% worse than Scotland’s. We’re going to say that again in case you think it’s a typo:

Seven hundred and seventy-one percent.

There’s a reason the Scottish public don’t trust Labour to run their public services, even when they’re imperfect. And everyone except Scottish Labour knows what it is.