One of Labour’s key allies in Scotland is solicitor Mike Dailly of the Govan Law Centre. Best known for his attempts to force the Scottish Government to subsidise the bedroom tax by cutting services elsewhere, he’s a venomously anti-SNP figure who rarely passes up the chance for a bit of Nat-bashing.
(It would, we’re sure, be overly cynical to suggest that Mr Dailly wants the bedroom tax propped up because if it was abolished he’d suddenly be out of the public eye.)
Today he’s published a blog angrily contesting the claim made in yesterday’s White Paper that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
We thought we’d take a look.
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Category
analysis, idiots, scottish politics
If you don’t have time to read 170,000:
“Xmas dinner at the food bank”. The best of both worlds, there. Sleep well.
Category
culture, uk politics
If you were at work when everything was happening this morning and this afternoon, here’s a one-stop catch-up guide to all the interesting media of the day.
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Category
media, scottish politics, video
We’re still dutifully ploughing through “Scotland’s Future”, but in truth we’re not really its target audience. We’re already convinced, and much of it is just like reading our own articles back except in rather blander language. What we can definitely say for certain is that it doesn’t lack detail – the composition of an independent Scotland’s armed forces, for example, is laid out almost down to the rifle.
Naturally, that didn’t stop the No camp from rushing onto the nation’s TV screens within minutes of the press launch ending with their considered, serious and thoughtful assessments of a document none of them had read.
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analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
Alert readers may have noticed that the Scottish Government website and the scotreferendum.com one are both somewhat besieged by traffic at the moment and struggling to load. So we’ve uploaded local copies of both the full White Paper and the summary document, in “epub” format (for tablet devices and smartphones) and PDF for reading on PCs. You can find them below.
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media, scottish politics
So today we got a response from the BBC to our Freedom Of Information request concerning this story. Those of you who’ve ever sent an FOI request to the state broadcaster before probably won’t need to read any further.
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Category
comment, culture, media
We’re indebted to an extra-specially-alert reader who keeps an eye on the Spanish press for us. Last week, leading newspaper El Pais carried a story which reported an interview given by Alistair Carmichael to various foreign media. The first paragraph contains a quote which Google Translate renders thus:
“If Scotland becomes a foreign country, we will treat [it] as a foreign country.”
A fascinating use of “we” there from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth, we’re sure you’ll agree. (Though we’re not sure who “we” would be in that scenario, as if Scotland was independent there’d be no Scottish Secretary and no Scottish MPs, so we can’t quite fathom what Mr Carmichael’s locus would be in the matter.)
We’d be prepared to chalk it down to the vagaries of automated translation, were it not for the fact that the minister said basically the same thing twice more this weekend, first referring to Scotland as “they” on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning, and then repeatedly as “her” on The Sunday Politics.
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comment, scottish politics
There’s an interesting piece from Lesley Riddoch in this morning’s Scotsman, pointing out that “Better Together” is scared to put its prospectus for a Scotland inside the UK to the electorate, preferring a purely destructive critical approach to the Yes side’s:
“If this was an important individual decision like the choice between two homes or two cars, you can bet your bottom dollar the pros and cons of each option would be minutely listed, questioned and compared by prudent consumers.
And yet as citizens we are content to make a decision on the future of Scotland based on scrutinising the apparent shortcomings of the independence option only.”
But while the piece echoes one we wrote last weekend pointing out that Scots will be choosing between two different futures next September (not just opting to keep things as they are) Riddoch doesn’t quite capture the full extent of the No camp’s cowardice, because she misses one important point.
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Tags: project feart
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
We apologise both for the slightly uncouth language in that headline and the mangling of an infamous phrase from the 1995 OJ Simpson murder trial.
But it’s hard to reasonably appraise the conduct of Scotland’s two supposed “quality” newspapers this weekend with regard to the Yes Scotland email hacking incident without using expletives, and that’s just about the mildest level of comment we could muster about the naked lies both have told the Scottish public.
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Tags: flat-out lies
Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
