As we noted on Tuesday, Scottish Labour’s opening election salvo for 2016 has been to blame the Scottish Government for unaffordable house prices.
Of the 450 most obvious flaws in that argument, not least the extraordinary efforts a 13-year Labour government went to to keep the housing bubble inflated, the one that caught our eye was that in the past three years we were regularly told of one thing that definitely WOULD bring prices down dramatically, but which Labour pathologically fought every step of the way.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: hypocrisySNP bad
Category
comment, history, scottish politics
(And the rest of the “pro-indy left”.)
If you’re primarily or solely contesting regional seats, and you’re chiefly (as seems to be the case) targeting people who are going to use their first vote for the SNP, “Vote for us so that we can provide strong opposition to the SNP” is a pretty weird pitch.
You’re basically asking people to use their second vote to cancel out their first. And that’s quite a tough angle to be trying to sell them. Just saying, like.
Category
comment, scottish politics
We suppose we shouldn’t technically be surprised that today’s newspapers carry no analysis whatsoever of Kezia Dugdale’s big speech yesterday detailing Scottish Labour’s first big election pledge – a £6000 handout to first-time home buyers.
After all, current polling suggests Scottish Labour have about as much chance of exerting any influence in the next Scottish Parliament as Lemmy has of posthumously winning the Eurovision Song Contest, so it doesn’t really matter if Kezia Dugdale promises every voter a free unicorn made of diamonds and glitter.
Still, if only for the mental exercise, it’s worth taking a look in detail.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, scottish politics
The tweets below are all genuine, and taken from the Scottish Labour Twitter account earlier today during its live-tweeting of Kezia Dugdale’s speech. We’ve rarely heard a more compelling and concise argument for a Yes vote. We take our hats off to her.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: and finally
Category
scottish politics
It’s always good to see someone take a strong moral stand.
When indeed, eh?
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, scottish politics
So, this appeared in the Herald today:
And that’s a problem, because it’s a complete and utter lie.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: flat-out lies
Category
comment, debunks, media, scottish politics
As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.
In more senses than one.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformationsmears
Category
analysis, debunks, media, scottish politics
The Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter has had some wise words to say on the subject of social media in the past few weeks, most recently on New Year’s Day:
The month before, though, he’d been even more to the point.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
admin, comment, culture, scottish politics
We tweeted this proposition last night (the quote comes from a blog post yesterday by Scottish Labour madcase and all-round comedy relief Ian Smart):
We thought you might enjoy some of the responses as much as we did.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
culture, scottish politics, video
Below is a very interesting 13-minute chat from this afternoon’s John Beattie Show on Radio Scotland, also featuring Stuart Cosgrove (presenter of the excellent footy prog Off The Ball) and Eamonn O’Neill, who we presume is this Eamonn O’Neill.
Naturally we like it because there’s mention of Wings, which – for just about the first time we can recall on broadcast media in our four-year life – isn’t about how vile and awful we are, but the whole thing is much more wide-ranging and well worth a listen.
(The line “The media the media doesn’t like to talk about” is Beattie’s, not ours.)
Category
audio, comment, media, navel-gazing
The Scottish Daily Mail, which alongside its Sunday sister paper is spending the festive period engaged in an “SNP BAD!” frenzy – attacking the party over everything from foxhunting to the brutal Stalinist suppression of free speech to using taxpayers’ money to send people Christmas cards – today runs the same story across a news page, a comment column and an editorial leader:
Let’s take a closer look.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
