Never let it be said that I’m not good to my niece. This morning I took her into Edinburgh to see the return of Labour’s Jim Murphy and his Irn Bru crates to the Independence Referendum trail. You may remember he had to call his “100 town in 100 days” tour off at the end of last week after encountering angry mobs of Yes campaigners. 

A much friendlier crowd, estimated by the BBC to be around 300, turned up to see him today in one of the most beautiful locations in Edinburgh outside the National Gallery which has the Castle behind and views down to the Scott Monument and Waverley Bridge.

I have to say I’m not Murphy’s biggest fan. I don’t like the language he has used in the past, saying that he is a patriot, not a nationalist. Everyone involved in this campaign has the best interests of Scotland at heart. There is just a fairly fundamental disagreement on how to deliver the best future  and I think that using words like patriotic raises the toxicity level of  the debate unnecessarily. I may be alone in this. I know Tim Farron used the word a lot during the European elections – and I told him exactly the same thing. There was a marked softening of that nationalist/patriot rhetoric from Murphy today. He used the word patriotic much more often than I am comfortable with, but he did acknowledge that it applied to everyone who loved Scotland.

It was standard campaign stuff with a bit of humour. He said that we could heckle him all we liked so long as we didn’t play with his crates. He’s also learned early on in the campaign not to give questioners the microphone because the first time he did that, they ran off with it. He looked very comfortable on the stump. As my niece wryly remarked, “It’ll be doing wonders for his ego.” There were a couple of heckles, and someone unfurled a big saltire with YES on it at the back. Oh, and there was a Sun journalist in a chicken suit for some reason best known to themselves. No eggs, though, this time. 

He talked a lot about international development and how Scotland as part of the UK is a major player on that particular stage, giving the second highest aid budget in the world. Why, he asked, would you want to leave a country that had that much international clout?

One constant criticism from the Yes campaign is that there are no guarantees of which powers will be devolved in the event of a No vote. Of course if they were presented with a list, they would then just say that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Murphy made the point that all 3 pro UK parties have guaranteed at UK level that there will be more powers, and they’ll make up 600 of the 650 MPs in Parliament.

It was important for the No campaign, which hasn’t had the best of weeks, to have a successful event and to show that they had faced down the angry mobs. From that point of view, it worked well. I think my favourite bit was listening to this guy, though:

After the event, Jim Murphy went over to Edinburgh West where he spent some time on the Better Together street stall with Willie Rennie and Mike Crockart.

For those of you who are following the Referendum campaign avidly, the final television debate takes place tonight. It’s very annoying that there is no Liberal Democrat on the Better Together team. However, there is, at last, a majority of women. The Yes side have Nicola Sturgeon, Green MSP Patrick Harvie and comedian Elaine C Smith. The No side has Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander. This stands a chance of being entertaining and worth watching.  It starts on STV at 8pm and lasts till 10 pm.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social