Last night the Labour MSP James Kelly – who was resoundingly rejected by voters in Rutherglen earlier this month but was forced on the Scottish Parliament anyway by his party – appeared on Scotland Tonight to debate the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act. You can see the full segment from 15m 35s here.

Mr Kelly told a number of quite serious lies. We’ve edited them together.

Let’s examine them in turn.

“The only opinion poll that’s been conducted is a flawed one”

This is a lie. There has NOT only been one poll conducted on OBFA. There have been numerous polls on the subject, including two in the last year – one by YouGov and one by Panelbase, both highly-respected professional polling organisations.

“The way that the questions were constructed – it wasn’t a properly set up poll with correct methodology that opinion poll firms would normally use, it’s been well discredited.”

This is a lie. Of course, we can’t be sure which of the two polls Mr Kelly is referring to there, as he lied about how many polls there were, but both were conducted with standard samples (approximately 1000 people) of the Scottish population, properly weighted and balanced to be demographically representative.

We’re able to make that assertion with 100% confidence about the Panelbase poll in particular, because we were the people who commissioned it. It used the exact same methodology and set-up of every other poll the company’s run.

These were the two exact questions asked (Panelbase and YouGov in that order):

Nothing is remotely wrong with the “construction” of either one.

“Of the cases that come to court, over half of them fail. So even if you accepted the basic premise of the Act, as a law it’s not working.”

This is a lie. Of OBFA cases brought to court, 69% (242 out of 352) have resulted in convictions and just 31% have failed. Last time we checked, 31% was less than half by a quite significant distance. There hasn’t been a single year in which “over half” of OBFA cases brought to court have failed.

(It’s a bewildering argument anyway. The current conviction rate for rape is only 46% – in itself a substantial and welcome increase over recent years – but we presume James Kelly doesn’t want rape legalised on the grounds that most prosecutions fail.)

Every substantive claim Mr Kelly made on TV last night was empirically, categorically and demonstrably factually wrong, and he must know they were wrong, unless he’s – even by Scottish Labour’s abysmally low standards – spectacularly incompetent.

Kelly is a disgrace to Holyrood – a stumbling monotone oaf who voters have tried to expel from their Parliament, only to be foiled by a party so utterly bereft of talent that it has nobody better to offer Scotland than a useless liar who can’t even count to two.

A media desperate to see the OBFA repealed so that it can get back to telling juicy stories of sectarian violence and hatred that sell lots of newspapers won’t expose his lies, so we have to do it instead. It’s a task we’re happy to take on.