Spot the difference ... Labour’s ‘hand me down’ video
IT boasts of being a ‘real story’ highlighting the state of Scotland’s NHS.
But Labour’s ‘Scottish’ party political broadcast has startling similarities to the version made for the UK party.
In fact, a close look at the two reveals they share the same locations and scripts, with actors even posing in the same positions.
Scottish leader Richard Leonard was yesterday accused of using a ‘hand-me-down’ broadcast after the striking similarities between the two political videos emerged.
It comes as he has been forced to defend running a ‘branch office’ in Scotland, while thousands of members leave the party. The new broadcast features a number of hospital staff and patients speaking about waiting times, delayed discharges, cancelled operations and other problems crippling the health service.
Both the Scottish and UK broadcasts begin by telling viewers that what follows is a ‘real story’.
They then show a nurse, with the party claiming one is in a Scottish hospital and one is in England.
But the nurses are in fact in the same room – with the same posters on the wall and even an identical X-ray image behind them. The nurse who is apparently in Scotland says: ‘I didn’t become a nurse for an easy life, none of us did.
‘We want to help people who need our help – plain and simple.’
In the version screened in England, the nurse says: ‘Nobody goes into nursing because you think you’re going to have an easy life, you do it because you want to help people – simple as that.’
The broadcast then shows a patient in Scotland sitting in a gown with cabinets and medical equipment behind them. In the English version a patient appears with the exact same background.
Last night, Nationalist MSP James Dornan said: ‘A hand-medown party political broadcast from their London bosses shows that Scottish Labour’s branch office status is alive and well.’
A Scottish Tory spokesman said: ‘It’s classic Scottish Labour – they’ve been given a bad idea from London, involving actors and fake lines, and made it worse.
‘This broadcast proves once again that Scottish Labour has become little more than a PO Box for Jeremy Corbyn’s latest order. The branch office is alive and well.’
Scottish Labour refused to reveal if the broadcast was funded by the Scottish or UK Labour party.
A spokesman said: ‘This is the story of NHS Scotland.’