The wording of that headline isn’t strictly accurate, because the Claim Of Right For Scotland – signed in 1989 by over 80% of Scottish MPs, and many other politicians and representatives of “civic Scotland” – isn’t a law, and has no binding force.
Nevertheless, it’s a document that carries a certain amount of political weight, as an open acknowledgement by Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the people of Scotland (not Parliament and the monarch, as is the case in England) are sovereign and are entitled to determine the form of government they want.
Up to a point, anyway.
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Tags: vote no get nothing
Category
analysis, history, scottish politics
Oh, there it is.
Click here for the fascinating full data. And when you hear Labour talk of “pooling and sharing resources” after a No vote, remember where it is that the pool’s located. Because they’ll probably be closing the one near your house.
Category
stats, uk politics
In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.
Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.
Category
scottish politics, stats, uk politics
Now and again, the independence debate gets so dismally stupid that we despair for a few hours and just sit around with our head in our hands trying to understand how professional, apparently-rational people can be so hopelessly, galactically thick.
Today the trigger was The Times, which issued the latest in a flurry of “post-White Paper” polls that have appeared with indecent haste and proclaimed the document’s failure, this time under the ridiculous headline “Poll sinks hope for a ‘yes’ vote”.
Do we even need to write the next bit? Does it really have to be spelled out?
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.
Yikes!
Category
disturbing, leaks, pictures, scottish politics, uk politics
Julie McDowall’s splendid piece for this site on call centres yesterday is causing something of a stir in the medical community today – social media is alive with shocked and disgusted doctors horrified or disbelieving at the news that their trade union, the British Medical Association, outsources its legal-advice helpline to a Serco call-centre and misleads members about its nature.
For those questioning the veracity of the claims, some references follow.
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Category
investigation, misc
Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?
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Category
navel-gazing, stats
As you can probably imagine, with over 140,000 readers a month we get quite a lot of emails. Unfortunately the contact form plugin we’ve used until now to avoid being swamped in spam (which is what tends to happen if you just give out your direct email address) is a bit rubbish, and results in an inbox that looks like this:
Having 95% of your email listed as being from “Contact” or “Contact form” is, we can reveal, a major pain in the backside when it comes to keeping track of conversations.
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Category
admin, housekeeping
Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.
(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)
We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.
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Tags: hypocrisy
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
Actually, we hear this one was meant for internal use only.
Tags: and finally
Category
leaks, pictures, scottish politics
We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:
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Tags: misinformationsmears
Category
culture, scottish politics, world
Oh dear lord. The No campaign really does seem hell-bent on making life hard for those of us who occasionally enjoy mocking it by (slightly) exaggerating the depths of its “Project Fear” scaremongering strategy. They’ve attempted to terrify Scots with uncertainty over the price of stamps, mobile-phone roaming charges and having to buy in Strictly Come Dancing, but none of it’s worked.
So now they’re pulling out the big guns: baked beans.
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Tags: project fear
Category
analysis, scottish politics
