Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).
It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.
So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.
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analysis, comment, history, media, reference, scottish politics, uk politics
We enjoyed this satirical piece on Buzzfeed today picturing how various world media outlets would handle the end of civilisation via a double meteor strike/zombie virus catastrophe. We’ve pinched some of their UK examples for illustrative purposes, and added a couple of our own at the end.
Have a go! It’s easy* and fun!
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Tags: and finally
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apocalypse, media, pictures, scottish politics
There’s a rather strange article by Peter Kellner, CEO of polling company YouGov, in today’s Guardian. It makes a whole series of dubious claims, one of the most startling being the assertion that “Labour is the pro-welfare party-of-the-heart”, a view somewhat at odds with the party’s stated intent to be “tougher than the Tories on benefits”.
But perhaps most curious of all was the piece’s strapline.
Because the idea that Labour was winning any battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over public-sector cuts was quite dramatically contradicted the very same day by some data released by… YouGov.
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analysis, stats, uk politics
Because it’s aimed at you. (As judging by the increase in donor numbers set against the number of clickthroughs we registered from yesterday’s piece to the benighted Yes Scotland fundraising page, there’s no mistaking where the money came from.)
Bella and Newsnet both now over £10,000 too, even though it’s barely over a week until Christmas. Take a moment to give yourselves a wee pat on the back, readers.
Tags: fundraisers
Category
misc
We haven’t done a “We said, he said” argument transcript for months and months, because as a rule they’re of extremely limited interest to anyone outside the political nerdosphere who isn’t familiar with the people involved.
But you don’t need any background to follow this one. So buckle up and do your best to wade past the obvious personal antagonism, because you won’t get a better illustration of the tortured mental twisting and squirming of the No campaign this year.
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Tags: foreigner watch
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comment, scottish politics, transcripts, uk politics
We’ve only corrected one paragraph in the following otherwise-verbatim story from today’s Daily Record, so that it now says what it actually means rather than the paraphrased family-newspaper version. Can any eagle-eyed readers spot it?
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uk politics
Now, we’re not putting ourselves up as some sort of expert fundraising authority just because we’ve run a few successful ones, but you didn’t have to be a genius to slap your forehead with your palm last month when the official Yes Scotland campaign AND two of the country’s biggest pro-indy websites (as well as a couple of smaller ones) contrived to launch appeals for very large amounts of cash not only all at once, but in the weeks leading up to Christmas when everyone’s budgets are stretched to the limit.
Bella Caledonia
Newsnet Scotland
Yes Scotland
(To give plenty of notice so that hopefully this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, our second annual Wings fundraiser will be in late February and March 2014.)
Still, we are where we are, and all three are now entering their final phases some way short of their targets. That’s not necessarily a big deal – the Scotland Yet one looked like failing by a big distance at this stage (as did the Common Weal’s before it), but reached the finishing line after a big boost from generous Wings readers.
But time’s getting tight, and the Herald has already had a bit of a sneer about the response to the Yes Scotland pledge drive, so if you can spare a quid or two for any or all of the three, we’re sure it’d be both appreciated and well used, especially in the context of the grisly collection of Tory millionaires, bankers and spooks who just handed “Better Together” another million and a half quid.
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Tags: fundraisers
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misc
The Huffington Post, 15 December 2013:
“The number of Britons who think Ed Miliband is likely to be the prime minister after the next election has fallen dramatically, according to a poll.
Research by ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror found 21% believed the Labour leader would be in No 10 after the next election, down 10 points since May.”
This, remember, is after a summer in which the nation’s political commentators almost universally agreed that Miliband’s conference promise of an energy price freeze and subsequent talk of a cost-of-living crisis was winning the hearts of the country.
Last week three separate opinion polls showed Labour’s lead over the Tories down to a pitiful five points, despite 70% of the population saying they’d felt no benefit from Britain’s feeble economic “recovery”.
We don’t think Labour has ever sacked a leader who hadn’t contested at least one general election. Ed Miliband will lead them to the polls in 2015, and only one in five Britons thinks he’ll end up in Number 10. Don’t take our word for it. Don’t heed the experts. Don’t even examine the statistics. Listen to the people who’ll be voting.
Tags: Kinnock Factorqftticktock
Category
analysis, stats, uk politics
It was nice to get a wee plug this morning on Radio Scotland’s always-interesting “Headlines” programme. Their online round-up talked about our piece on Scandinavian taxation, and contrasted it with one written by Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser for the right-wing “ThinkScotland” blog, in which he disputed the widely-held, and oft-decried by Yes supporters, notion that the UK was one of the most unequal countries in the civilised world.
Now, anyone who’d also read Wings columnist Julie McDowall’s superb, blood-boiling article on foodbanks in today’s Sunday Herald might naturally be rather sceptical of Fraser’s claim that the UK was an egalitarian paradise of wealth distribution, but he provided a link, so we had a look.
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analysis, investigation, reference, scottish politics, stats, world
One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.
That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.
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analysis, reference, scottish politics, stats, uk politics, world