Yesterday, a wealthy American man who as far as we know won’t have a vote in the referendum expressed a personal opinion about independence which made the front page of half of Scotland and Britain’s newspapers, was trumpeted all over the TV and radio, and got “Better Together” very excited.
This morning some idiot based in Luxembourg honked about it on BBC Breakfast news, throwing in his own clueless and ill-informed (and of course, unchallenged) view. We’re having some difficulty working out why we’re supposed to care about either man’s position, or why they were given lots of free airtime to espouse them.
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Category
comment, idiots, scottish politics, video
On the eve of Wings Over Scotland’s 2000th post, we thought we’d celebrate.
Because today we learned something strange.
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Tags: and finallylizards
Category
comment, disturbing, uk politics
It seems that today marked the official start of the much-vaunted “lovebombing” campaign aimed at persuading Scots to stay in the UK by showing them how much they’re loved by the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The opening salvo did some unfortunate and costly collateral damage, but luckily the Union had a white knight following close behind to smooth over any injured feelings.
Would you like to meet him, readers?
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Category
comment, culture, scottish politics, uk politics
The Sun’s editions on both sides of the border today go in heavy with the results of a YouGov poll showing a dramatic turnaround in the percentage of English (and Welsh) people who want Scotland to leave the UK.
Or at least, SOME of the results.
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Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve already mentioned this in passing, but it’s worth pulling out in its own right, because people hardly ever bother to click links in features and it’s kind of important.
Late last year we had a bit of an epiphany in terms of realising the implications of Scottish Labour’s draft proposals for giving more powers to the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote in the independence referendum. We suggested that the plans were in fact a trap, which would be a disaster for Scotland and see billions of pounds of cuts in the Scottish budget.
What we weren’t expecting was for Labour MP Ian Davidson to confirm it for us.
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Category
analysis, scottish politics
There’s both good and bad news for the embattled Scottish Labour “leader” in today’s newspapers. But before we get to that, we’d like you to watch this.
The gent posing the rather lengthy question is Sean Clerkin, the man Iain Gray hid from in Subway. We must admit we’re not quite sure why he thinks Johann Lamont has anything to do with Atos sponsoring the Commonwealth Games – something which would presumably be a matter for the Scottish Government and/or Glasgow City Council, neither of which she controls – but the Labour MSP’s reaction is remarkable.
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
Readers, you can’t begin to imagine how much stuff happens. Seriously, it’s going on EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME. You’d think there’d be lulls now and again, but people just keep doing things. It’s annoying.
Throughout the day, we’ll see or be sent roughly a billion links, and because otherwise you’d never keep up with Twitter alone, what you do is click any that sound interesting to open them in a tab, then go and actually read them later when you’ve got the time.
Unfortunately there are always more things than time (like, WAY more), so you end up having a huge backlog of tabs that you either haven’t read, or have read but haven’t got round to writing something about yet.
We’ve just had a brutal pruning of Firefox and we’ve still got 76 open, so to let us get a few more closed we’re just going to stick some of the ones we HAVE read here and you can go through any you like the sound of for yourselves. They’re all good.
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Tags: and finally
Category
misc
We were a little perplexed this morning by the Daily Record’s banner headline.
And not just because of the unusually generous use by the Labour-supporting paper of the term “SNP Government” (rather than “Scottish Goverment”) on a good-news story.
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Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
It’s not as if the Financial Times doesn’t have history with dropping great big payloads of high explosive into the middle of the independence debate late on a Sunday night. But a piece coming up in Monday’s edition (and online tonight) is going to choke a few breakfasts in London tomorrow morning.
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Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.
1. The honesty patrol
Cybernats!
2. The lonely hours
Cybernats!
3. Cybernat of the week
CYBERNATS!
4. The Mars bar at your seat
Idiot.
5. You’d need a heart of stone
Idiot whines about cybernats.
Eesh. Grim stuff. Let’s hope for a more pleasant week to come.
Category
scottish politics, stats
