The latest leaked poster from our spy in the No camp. “They’re pretty sure this one’s legally bulletproof“, was all it said on the note in the envelope.
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”
– Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
This is what the media is asking you to swallow today, readers:
“If Scotland wants to be like the vast majority of NATO members and have no nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, NATO will cut off its own nose to spite its face and reject Scotland as a member, even though that would leave the strategically-crucial North Atlantic Gate (also known as the ‘GIUK Gap‘) guarded by a non-member state and one with basically no military at all.”
Right.
Uh-huh.
Sure. Of course.
We’ve said it before, readers, and with the heaviest of hearts we must presume that we’ll have to say it many more times in the next 100 days: they think you’re morons.
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.
For the sake of our blood pressure we don’t normally tune in to Radio Scotland’s weekday phone-in show, but as Lallands Peat Worrier was on it today we stayed with it for a few minutes, and found ourselves getting increasingly annoyed as presenter Kaye Adams asked caller after caller if they thought Barack Obama’s comments on independence yesterday (in so far as he actually made any) had been “off the cuff”.
We knew they hadn’t been, so we rang up just to keep the record straight.
We wanted to have Obama’s awkward, halting delivery on file anyway, so this’ll do.
We got another letter from the government today. After a sudden outbreak of candour last week with regard to the civil service writing Buzzfeed articles, this is more the sort of thing we’re accustomed to from Freedom Of Information requests.
There’s a considerable amount of uncertainty currently flying around on the internet with regards to Alistair Darling’s comments in an interview with the New Statesman which was published on the magazine’s website yesterday.
There seems to be no dispute that the “Better Together” leader compared Alex Salmond to dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, adding his name to the illustrious pantheon of assorted Unionist politicians and journalists who’ve likened Scotland’s democratically-elected First Minister to a series of genocidal murderers.
There is, however, something of a grey area around whether Mr Darling also accused the entire SNP of promoting “blood-and-soil nationalism” – an extremely offensive term normally used in reference to Nazi Germany, where it translated as “Blut und Boden”.
Well, let us clear that up for you. Yes, he did.
We’re going to the IndepenDance.
An alert reader at a scanning shop in Falkirk found this today, left behind by the previous customer. Click the thumbnail above for the full majesty, as it were.
We had an interesting chinwag with a very nice chap called David Phillips at the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier today. By the time he called we’d already managed to determine where the missing hundreds of millions had gotten to (a planned £400m cut to the Scottish defence budget from Westminster that oddly doesn’t get mentioned much when Unionists are telling us how we need to stay in the Union to protect defence jobs), but we did learn some other stuff.
Not unrelatedly, we thought it might be fun to list just a few of the factors in the IFS’s calculations of the finances of an independent Scotland that rely on being able to accurately predict the future – a skill at which governments and economists alike have, let’s say, a sub-optimal track record.
After some nudging from us, YouGov have now slightly belatedly added the data tables and question text from their recent “Better Together”-commissioned poll on benefits and tax receipts to their website.
Strangely, none of the media reports of the poll mentioned the fact that in addition to quizzing Scots, the company asked the same set of questions* to full-sized samples of English and Welsh voters too. (Indeed, the samples for England and Wales were both bigger – 1051 Scots were polled, 1116 Welsh people and 1744 English.)
We don’t know why nobody cares about the opinion of the Northern Irish. But the data highlighted some interesting discrepancies, and one very surprising thing.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
