It is, we’ve remarked before, often difficult to satirise Scottish Labour, because it’s hard to think of anything more fatuous, transparently hypocritical or just plain idiotic than the things they actually say for real. The party’s recent demand that the Scottish Government should set up a “resilience fund” to cushion the blow of falls in oil prices – or as everyone else on Earth usually calls it, an “oil fund” – is only the latest example.

There are just five months between the two tweets above. Yet Labour seemingly believes that the Scottish public will already have completely forgotten that the party spent most of the last two years telling Scots an oil fund was a mad, impossible idea.

But it’s even more ludicrous than it sounds.

Other than the sudden change of heart, the most obvious absurdity is that since the discovery of oil in the mid-70s, Labour has been in power for almost 20 years without taking the opportunity to create a sovereign wealth fund (for either Scotland or the whole UK) from Scotland’s North Sea bounty.

While it naturally blamed the Tories for the failure, it was Labour who were at the helm when oil started coming ashore in large volumes, but instead of setting up a safety net for the future it deliberately underplayed the value (and the lifespan) of the resource because of the political threat posed by the SNP.

But there’s much more recent history than that. The last time the oil price fell to the $50 a barrel region where it sits today was in 2009, by which time Labour was in power at Westminster again. Its reaction was interesting.

Rather than act at Westminster, where oil revenue is actually received and controlled, Scottish Labour issued an angry attack on the SNP Scottish Government, which had published a discussion paper on doing exactly the thing Labour called for this week. Just five years ago, it described the SNP’s oil-fund policy as “financial incompetence” and “desperate stuff”, insisting that “none of the figures [stack] up”.

(Mysteriously, that page is no longer visible on the Scottish Labour website.)

By a remarkable coincidence, the Secretary of State for Scotland at the time Labour was comprehensively rubbishing the idea of an oil fund was an up-and-coming MP from the party’s right wing by the name of Jim Murphy.

Notwithstanding that it was the exact opposite of what he’d wanted in 2009, Murphy made clear what action he was demanding of the Scottish Government in 2015:

In other words, while Westminster retains full control of oil revenues, Murphy wants the Scottish Government to underspend its own budget, tucking some money away for a rainy day. So a reasonable reader might presume he’d be delighted at the news, which also made the press this week, that in fact it had done exactly that, managing to put aside £444m (just over a modest 1% of the total) in 2013-14.

Yet when the Herald broke the story, it uncharacteristically and inexplicably failed to source a comment from Scotland’s main opposition party. Instead the Tories and the Lib Dems were left to furiously lambast the Scottish Government for managing to squirrel away some cash for emergencies.

(We’re sure this was just an accidental oversight on the part of the Herald’s Scottish political editor Tom Gordon when he penned the piece. Because otherwise forgetting for the first time ever to call the Scottish Labour press office when the opportunity to bash the SNP arose could look, well, a little suspicious to cynical readers.)

Labour has opposed a North Sea oil fund for 40 years. It failed to create one during 20 years in power. It has consistently ruled out any idea of oil revenue being devolved to Holyrood. When it was in power in London during the last oil-price crisis, when its current Scottish leader was the Scottish Secretary, it attacked the idea of the Scottish Government setting one up as “desperate”.

Now, though, it wants Scots to forget all that. To forget 1974, to forget 2009, to forget 2014. It even wants them to forget its curious silence just yesterday. We, at least, will be here to refresh people’s memories.