Today the Scottish Parliament spent several hours heatedly debating a motion to call for a second Section 30 order to enable a new independence referendum (several more will follow tomorrow before the vote). We watched all of it so you didn’t have to, and are delighted to present you with a few clips that probably won’t make the news.
On such a momentous topic, this was the intervention that Scottish Labour list MSP Monica Lennon felt was the most pressing issue to raise, for example:
We’re very touched, obviously, and will add it to our file of other mentions in the chamber and elsewhere. But there were probably more important things to discuss.
The tweet on the left is one of the rare appearances of Scottish Labour’s fabled “2014 Truth Team”, while over on the right is a snippet from Scottish Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale’s column in this morning’s Daily Record.
Launched amid much fanfare over a year ago, Scottish Labour’s ironically-named “2014 Truth Team” has been a source of great merriment to Yes supporters for many months. Having apparently run out of “truth” after just a few weeks of snarky tweets, the account had been silent since last summer, so imagine our surprise when it suddenly burst back into life today.
We say “back”, but in fact the Twitter account had been wiped clean as if it had never existed. All the old followers were still there, but now there were just four tweets, all of them advertising an exciting new feature on the Scottish Labour website entitled “The Top 20 Nationalist Assertions” and promising to “set out the facts” about them – the implication being, of course, that the assertions were untrue.
Fact-checking, eh? Well, that’s the sort of thing we just can’t resist.
We’ve just endured Gordon Brown’s 45-minute “old man shouting out a series of random unconnected facts from Wikipedia” speech at Glasgow University. (You should be able to find it later on the iPlayer under the programme title “Briefings”, if you really want to.) It doesn’t bear a lot of analysis, being just the same old cobblers you’ve heard a thousand times before, but delivered in a more rambling manner.
There was one vaguely interesting thing about the event, though.
Readers probably won’t be astonished to learn that we’ve still heard nothing from anyone in Scottish Labour in response to our six simple questions about their “Devo Nano” proposals. We’ve waited three full days now and haven’t had so much as an acknowledgement of receipt or a reply to any of our tweets, so it seems safe to say we’re not going to get one.
Earlier this week we had a little fun at the expense of the anaemic “grassroots” No campaign, revealing that almost all of its planned activity between now and the referendum was a single day’s leafleting of some railway stations. Yesterday we found out the reason – they’ve got a new leaflet, all about yesterday’s unspectacular comments on currency by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank Of England.
We have to assume that the leaflet was printed before the speech, and that any assertions it might make about Mr Carney’s view might not necessarily be entirely true. So let’s see if we can make sure everything stays on the straight and narrow.
That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:
The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.
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 have a fun task for Scottish Labour’s exciting new “Truth Team”, which made its debut last week. Clearly it would be rather unseemly to go around proclaiming yourself an arbiter of truth if there was a great big lie at the heart of your very existence, so hopefully someone on the Team will be able to explain the curious and seemingly untrue assertion that still heads up Scottish Labour’s own Twitter account.
