If there’s one area where you really have to hand it to “Better Together”, it’s sheer shamelessness. Despite having been humiliatingly exposed for inflating attendance figures at their events by at least 100% twice on this site alone, to the great merriment of Yes campaigners, they just keep right on going without a hint of embarrassment.
We can’t help starting to wonder if this might all be one of those sort of “When I was going to St Ives…” trick riddle things. How many Darling Youth kids make 70?
Alert readers may recall the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign’s rather, shall we say, enthusiastic approach to statistics. Earlier today we noticed them excitedly tweeting “Head count just done! About 600 at the launch of #bettertogether Edinburgh!”, and wondered if they might have once again been so kind as to provide a picture for purposes of verification. And bless them, they had.
If you’re looking at that shot and thinking that it’s certainly full but doesn’t look much like “about 600″ people, you’re not alone. So we did a quick bit of investigating.
We stumbled across this quite by accident yesterday. We think you’ll enjoy it.
The clip is from last year, and was aired on Canadian national news channel Sun News. Douglas Murray is a British writer who claims to be half-Scottish on account of unspecified links to Unionist breeding ground the Isle of Lewis, popular haunt of No-camp luminaries like Alistair Darling, virulent anti-devolutionist Brian Wilson and controversial “Better Together” donor Ian Taylor.
Murray studied at Eton and Oxford and writes for august UK journals like the Spectator and Guardian, as well as appearing on numerous BBC TV political programmes. For some reason, the Canadians consider him an expert on Scottish politics, qualified to inform and enlighten their viewers on the subject. See what you think.
We already know that the No camp has, shall we say, a bit of difficulty when it comes to basic arithmetic. But rarely do they demonstrate it so eagerly as they did last night.
We very much appreciate their helping to make our job easier.
(Our emphases.) That’s pretty clear, then – the No campaign will not accept money from “foreign donors”, but will take “up to £500″ from people resident in the UK.
We’ve been documenting of late how the No campaign has grown increasingly negative and smear-based since the turn of the year, as opinion polls show a trend of small but consistent movement towards independence. One of the core characteristics of negative political campaigning is to accuse your opponents of doing the thing you’re actually doing, and the last couple of days have thrown up some striking examples.
That’s our old pal Euan McColm of the Scotsman, of course. And he’s not alone.
This is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall looking comfortable and confident on last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight as the recently-controversial subject of campaign donations was discussed.
Ian Davidson, as we’ve already noted, was in fact absent from BOTH votes on the bedroom tax. (Tom Harris missed the February division for personal reasons, but 214 of Labour’s 258 MPs evidently didn’t consider it “meaningless”, turning up to vote in favour of the opposition motion put forward by the SNP and Plaid Cymru.)
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.
There seems to be some doubt with regard to the veracity of the answer.
