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Archive for September, 2013


The phoney war 193

Posted on September 26, 2013 by

One of the recurring themes we hear from people about the independence debate (from Yes, No and Don’t Know folks alike) is a bewilderment about the alleged amount of grassroots campaigning undertaken by the No camp. “Better Together” is fond of making extravagant claims on its website about its number of volunteers, events and leaflets, yet almost nobody we speak to has ever seen any of them.

So we were interested to receive an email from a reader this week.

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The afterthought 274

Posted on September 25, 2013 by

Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.

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Quoted for irony 419

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

In a piece entitled “Scottish Labour leader says nationalism is a virus”, the Courier yesterday reported that Johann Lamont’s speech to the Labour conference “appeared to allude to the European 20th century fascist movement”.

blondelamonte

And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.

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Throwing mud in glass houses 114

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

There’s been a certain amount of hoo-haa within the independence camp this morning about a Telegraph piece reporting comments by Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran in which she appears to cast doubt on whether devolution has been a good thing for Scotland at all.

curran

We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.

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Filling in the blanks 93

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:

missing

Can you supply the missing words?

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We’ve got five minutes spare 123

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Arch-Unionist and BBC-favoured pundit (hey, what a freakish coincidence! What are the odds?) Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University has a blog post up today. A reader asked us to go and tackle it, but Prof. Tomkins has one of those infinitely irritating twatblogs that won’t let you post comments unless you hand over all your personal details and give permission for spambots to assail your Facebook and Twitter accounts with annoying gibberish, so we’ll have to do it here instead.

uniontwat3

It won’t make any sense unless you read the post first. It’s here.

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A flavour of the day 153

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Okay, one last thing. This is the best footage of Saturday we’ve seen:

(Oh, and the Scottish Police Federation are now tweeting a crowd figure of 20,000.)

Normal service coming soon 340

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Okay, we’ve got a LOT of housekeeping-type stuff to get on with, so the next couple of days might be a wee bit quiet. We’ll need to be dealing with the ridiculous goings-on at the Labour conference this weekend at some point, but for now let’s just round up the last few issues regarding Saturday’s awesome independence march and rally and get it all out of the way.

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Readers’ lives 437

Posted on September 22, 2013 by

We’ve already run a small collection of our own ham-fisted snapshots, but here are just a few of our favourite pics of yesterday’s rally in Edinburgh that were taken and sent to us by Wings Over Scotland readers.

flagsforth

Click all the pics for larger versions.

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And now over to the state broadcaster 67

Posted on September 22, 2013 by

1280

Handshakes, hugs and hope 411

Posted on September 21, 2013 by

I didn’t take nearly enough photos. But there’ll be more coming from others.

mr1

What a day that was.

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London calling 181

Posted on September 21, 2013 by

[We’ve got something special for those of you who can’t make it to the march in Edinburgh today (or are reading en route). Julie McDowall pens the Herald’s brilliant online dating blog, but there’s a lot more to her writing than that.]

There is a groove on my skull. I can run my fingertip along it.

On your first day in a call centre they present you with a headset. You might chuckle when you first wear it, pretending to be Madonna or a helicopter pilot. But the chuckles die at the end of the shift when you lift the metal band and ruffle your hair, feeling the dent on your head.

cc1

And it can hurt, so you start to unclamp the contraption between calls and hang it round your neck, but a manager is soon gesturing wildly at you with the ‘hood up’ signal. Get that metal band clamped back onto your head. You may not remove it.

After a few years, a permanent line is engraved on your skull. You are branded.

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