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Ian Davidson is a liar 137

Posted on March 30, 2013 by

If you click this link, you’ll see some footage of the Labour MP for Glasgow South West, Ian Davidson, at today’s protest against the bedroom tax. The unnamed person with the camera approaches him and confronts him with a direct question.

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There seems to be some doubt with regard to the veracity of the answer.

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The First Minister is a liar 157

Posted on March 18, 2021 by

We’ve received information this afternoon with regard to Nicola Sturgeon’s statements at today’s FMQs, which appear to have been wholly and disturbingly dishonest.

The quote below is from an email sent today by SNP communications chief Murray Foote, briefing ministers and MSPs on the official Scottish Government line, which is what the First Minister told the chamber in response to a question from Ruth Davidson.

We pass the true facts on to you below.

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David Mundell is a liar 372

Posted on May 04, 2019 by

This was the Secretary of State for Scotland on the BBC’s coverage of the Scottish Conservative conference earlier today.

The broadcaster’s political editor Brian Taylor gets uncharacteristically indignant with Mundell’s response, and well he might.

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An unexpected alliance 108

Posted on February 04, 2014 by

We’ve already mentioned this in passing, but it’s worth pulling out in its own right, because people hardly ever bother to click links in features and it’s kind of important.

Late last year we had a bit of an epiphany in terms of realising the implications of Scottish Labour’s draft proposals for giving more powers to the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote in the independence referendum. We suggested that the plans were in fact a trap, which would be a disaster for Scotland and see billions of pounds of cuts in the Scottish budget.

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What we weren’t expecting was for Labour MP Ian Davidson to confirm it for us.

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Tom Harris is a liar 14

Posted on November 14, 2011 by

We’re going to come right out and say it. Tom Harris MP will not be the next leader of Scottish Labour. This is because while Scottish Labour might be collectively a bit dim, it’s not THAT dim. Despite having by far the highest media profile of the three leadership candidates (which, in fairness, is clearing a not-very-high bar), Harris failed to secure the support of a single Holyrood MSP for his nomination, a situation that would hopelessly undermine whichever unfortunate lackey was chosen to deliver his attacks on Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Questions.

Opponents of blood sports would shy away from the screen in horror as Labour challenged the FM every week with – at best – a deputy leader acting as a mouthpiece for a Westminster MP. The lack of credibility of an MSP group unable to put forward a single member of sufficient talent to lead would make the party in Scotland a laughing stock, particularly if – as might well happen – the new deputy was a Westminster politician too, such as Ian Davidson or Anas Sarwar.

The SNP, though, will doubtless be hoping against hope that Harris manages to win anyway, because the MP for Glasgow South would represent a massive liability to Labour in many other ways too.

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Return To Arsehole Mountain 405

Posted on July 22, 2020 by

The Scottish media is in a total frenzy this morning over the long-delayed publication of the “Russia Report” into alleged interference by Vladimir Putin’s regime in UK politics.

The Herald, Scotsman, Mail, Express and the i all lead their front pages with the story today, and the Telegraph did it yesterday. So we thought you might like to see the entirety of the indyref coverage that’s actually in the 55-page report.

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Seeing it from here 187

Posted on July 25, 2017 by

I went to “Dunkirk” at the cinema today. If you want to know what it’s like, just watch this trailer 40 times in a row and save yourself the £12.

It’s a poor movie, disjointed and aimless and curiously lacking in tension or narrative given the real-life subject matter. (It’s remarkably short on dialogue, which is lucky because you can barely make out any of what little script or story there is from behind the endlessly howling one-note airhorn of the soundtrack. It’s a bit like someone filmed an IKEA assembly manual in live action during a Formula 1 race.)

But I couldn’t help thinking that part of the reason it was so unengaging was because it felt akin to watching a boxing match between two fighters you don’t like. If Mike Tyson took on Tyson Fury, would you cheer for the rapist or the anti-Semitic homophobe?

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Some things are simple 428

Posted on March 14, 2017 by

Judging by the first 24 hours, we’re in for a two-year festival of utter horror from the UK and Scottish media. Yesterday saw a never-ending parade of metrosplaining idiots dragged willingly in front of cameras and microphones to pontificate their clueless and mind-numbingly ignorant drivel about Scotland.

It wasn’t possible to keep track of it all, because it was frequently happening on five channels at once, and it was harder still to watch it for any extended period of time without hurling a brick through the screen in frustration at the offensive stupidity of it.

Feeding into that was a stream of Scottish politicians who actually did know better, but who are too catastrophically dim to adapt to changing circumstances and had no strategy other than to endlessly repeat the same cretinous soundbites over and over.

(Adam Tomkins in particular was ubiquitous, spending what felt like several hours on various airwaves reciting the same brainless 10-second schtick forever.)

The constitutional politics of the UK and Scotland are in flux, and many aspects of the situation are complicated. But quite a lot of them aren’t, and if we’re all going to make it through the next two years without stabbing each other in the throat, it’d be a lot better if everyone accepted the things that are definite, empirical, indisputable facts.

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Cresting the rising tide 400

Posted on November 15, 2016 by

There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.

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It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.

This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:

Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.

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The Some Arsehole Doctrine 226

Posted on November 04, 2016 by

Yesterday we drew attention to a disgracefully untrue claim made by the leader of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To A Second Referendum Party at the day’s FMQs.

Davidson had attempted to pass off the personal views of just THREE members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as representing the official position of the august and 125,000-strong body. It’s the sort of bare-faced lie we’re sadly accustomed to hearing from opposition leaders in the chamber, but it was also an illustration of a much wider and depressingly-growing phenomenon.

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Let’s learn about it together.

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The Count 274

Posted on October 19, 2016 by

An article by Nick Cohen in the Spectator last night fairly had social media ablaze with a heady brew of anger and mockery.

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It’s the most extraordinary outpouring of deranged, spittle-flecked arsewash we’ve seen outside of a Daily Express comment thread in a very considerable time, and it merits attention solely because we think it might have broken a world record for the number of empirical falsehoods contained in an article in a respectable media outlet.

Get your clickers out, readers. You’re going to need a fast trigger finger.

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The extraordinary untruth 237

Posted on March 11, 2016 by

We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.

It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.

At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.

Wait, what?

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