LABOUR have been sending out election leaflets – in the post because they can’t persuade any volunteer activists to do it for them. Just the other day another popped through the letter box, courtesy of an over-burdened and underpaid privatised postal service worker, telling us that we need to stop the Tories from being the largest party because another Tory government would be a disaster for Scottish families.

Like those families who work for the privatised postal service that Labour have no intention of un-privatising, who will see their disaster continuing unchecked.

The claim that Labour need to be the largest party is constantly repeated by Jim Murphy and his dwindling band of minions, the haemorrhoids – they’re reddish, irritating, and dangle from a bum. It’s not actually true – Labour don’t need to be the largest party, that’s not how the House of Commons works – and you’d think that the Labour party would know this. But then they’ve not been paying attention to Scotland for the past 20 years, so we shouldn’t really expect them to have been paying attention to anything much else either. Except their expenses claims, of course. The truth is that the government is formed by the party that can get its budget and Queen’s Speech through the voting lobby, and that could just as easily be the second-largest party with the tacit support of the third-largest.

Jim himself acknowledges that it’s not true, speaking in that creepily quiet exasperated tone he adopts whenever it is pointed out to him that he is talking a load of cack again.

He was at it again being interviewed by Jim Naughtie on Radio 4 on Wednesday, and even the Naughtie one, who once referred to the Labour party as “we”, seemed to be getting exasperated. Press Jim Murphy on the issue and he’ll state that the last time the second-largest party formed the government was in 1924, so Jim does actually admit that he’s been talking cack.

A great many things have changed since 1924; for starters, in 1924 the Labour party was actually socialist and would have dealt with a suppose-he’s-Tory like Jim quicker than a person with a bad case of piles would have reached for a suppository. But what’s not changed is arithmetic.

If the second-largest party and the third-largest party together can form a majority in the Commons, the largest party still isn’t going to form the government. Numbers haven’t changed since 1924, and neither has the way the Commons calculates a majority. Jim knows that. He even admits it. He’s just hoping the fact it doesn’t happen very often that the second largest party forms the government, and the last time it happened was 90 years ago, means that voters will think it’s an implausible as a lottery win, or indeed as implausible as Labour ever returning to their socialist roots. But it looks likely to happen this year, which is great news for Scotland and dreadful news for Jim.

The electorate of Scotland have discovered the preparation H that’s going to soothe the irritation of a right-wing Labour party. And Jim’s shrinking.

In the same interview Jim accused the SNP of “overflowing with arrogance”. He’d know a lot about arrogance. Labour in Scotland have traded on nothing else for the past 30 years. Jim’s about to discover what the rest of us think of his party’s arrogance, hence his growing hysteria.

Meanwhile, in an effort to clench Labour’s flabby buttocks, Shadow Chancellor Ed Baws has come to Scotland to warn us that a vote for the SNP is a vote for the Tories and a vote for austerity.

That's the Ed Baws who said that he wouldn’t undo any of George Osborne’s recent Budget. Ed wants Labour to win so he can present his own Budget, which will be remarkably similar to Osborne’s. And then Ed will get to stand outside number 11 Downing Street waving his bright red Baws bag full of austerity policies with a Labour sad face. Only Ed won’t be looking very sad, since he’s only got one look and that’s smug and self-satisfied. The only people who won’t be remotely satisfied with a Baws budget are traditional Labour voters.

Sadly for Ed and his smugness, the visit to Scotland to scare the natives was overshadowed by the news that more than 100 business leaders have written to The Daily Telegraph to warn that if Labour get into power then the rogue planet that was predicted by the Mayan calendar will come hurtling through space and will wreak havoc on all parts of the UK that are not owned by non-doms and bring about the end of civilisation as we know it – at least in non-Tory-voting areas where business leaders think it would be hard to tell the difference.

Labour are trying to laugh off the letter as just a wee joke for April Fool’s Day, what with business persons being a natural Tory constituency who are going to support the party that’s going to let them away with paying less tax. Secretly, however, Labour are annoyed, since their record in government of letting businesses off paying tax is every bit as reprehensible as the Tories’. Haemorrhoids issued statements saying that the letter should be ignored because it had been orchestrated by the Tories and was therefore, by definition, a lie.

This is all very different from last year during the referendum campaign, when Labour were telling Scotland that the warnings of leading business executives – and Michelle the Moan – that voting in a way they didn’t like would bring about economic destruction and ruin should be treated like the Holy Writ of the Lord God and we should all cower in fear of the wrath of Duncan Bannatyne. Last year, Labour clapped and cheered when business leaders issued dire predictions of the end of the universe after being put up to it by the Tories. But we’re in a different election, and we know, according to Labour, warnings of the end of civilisation are only true for Scotland.

Glad that’s been cleared up then.