The Daily Mash, 12 February 2015:
Because a good satirist can sometimes make a point better in seven sentences than idiots like us can in a 1000-word article, and make it funny at the same time.
The very few readers who don’t immediately just snort and turn the page when they see the words “George Foulkes” may have noticed in yesterday’s Herald that the thirsty peer could be found gloating gleefully that had Scotland voted for independence last September it would now be “bankrupt” due to the decline in oil prices.
We can’t be bothered pointing out for the 500th time that a Yes vote wouldn’t have seen Scotland actually independent until March 2016, and that the oil price NOW is therefore about as relevant to anything as, well, Baron Foulkes himself.
But we couldn’t help noticing a couple of small arithmetical details.
There really isn’t very much of a news story in this morning’s Sun “exclusive” that some Labour MPs say they’d quit the party rather than work with the SNP should the electorate deliver such a result in May. One told the paper:
“I would quit the party — there’s no way I would sit alongside them.
Those of us who remember the parade of furious Scottish Labour figures going on TV and openly threatening to scupper any “rainbow coalition” involving the Nats in 2010, thereby ensuring that David Cameron and George Osborne came to power, won’t be the least bit surprised at the sheer depth of hatred and jealous rage that consumes Labour’s branch office in North Britain when the SNP are mentioned.
And there’s nothing eyebrow-raisingly new in Scottish Labour’s spiteful determination that if Scots vote against the Conservatives – but not for Labour – they should be punished with Tory governments. It’s the standard policy of electoral blackmail that the party has deployed against the rise of rivals from the left for years, and which it’s now also turning against the Greens south of the border.
But there is a telling phrase in that short quote.
We figured you’d probably want to see this.
(Skip to 3.00 to get past the pointless title frame. Text of speech here.)
Independent website Political Compass has just released its 2015 graph charting the ideological positions of all the political parties of the UK. It’s a fairly predictable one.
On the image above, we’ve added, for parties active in Scotland only, striped circles indicating each party’s 2010 position. But what does it tell us about 2015?
It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.
(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)
The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.
The Telegraph, 13 September 2014:
We can only assume something pretty amazing must have happened since then.
A number of readers last night sent us copies of the response to complaints they’d made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the Daily Record’s infamous “The Vow” front cover. We attach the full judgement at the bottom of this article, and as far as we’re concerned it’s fair and accurate. The Vow was a deliberate deception, but it didn’t break any rules – it merely relied on readers misinterpreting it.
The bit we’re still interested in is the paragraph above.
We know we were all traumatised at the time, but how on Earth did we miss this?
It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.
The article concluded with some comments from Labour.
Which is, y’know, bold.
Still confused about the difference between an “oil fund” and a “resilience fund”, folks?
So were we, but no longer. We’ve had a breakthrough.
Posted this morning, after a week in which it was so comprehensively proven to be a complete lie that even Torcuil Crichton of the Daily Record was forced to concede it.
You almost have to grudgingly admire the sheer bull-headed tenacity of their dogged determination to prove once and for all to the people of Scotland that Labour think they’re dribbling gullible morons.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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