In a piece entitled “Scottish Labour leader says nationalism is a virus”, the Courier yesterday reported that Johann Lamont’s speech to the Labour conference “appeared to allude to the European 20th century fascist movement”.
And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.
There’s been a certain amount of hoo-haa within the independence camp this morning about a Telegraph piece reporting comments by Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran in which she appears to cast doubt on whether devolution has been a good thing for Scotland at all.
We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.
Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:
Can you supply the missing words?
Arch-Unionist and BBC-favoured pundit (hey, what a freakish coincidence! What are the odds?) Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University has a blog post up today. A reader asked us to go and tackle it, but Prof. Tomkins has one of those infinitely irritating twatblogs that won’t let you post comments unless you hand over all your personal details and give permission for spambots to assail your Facebook and Twitter accounts with annoying gibberish, so we’ll have to do it here instead.
It won’t make any sense unless you read the post first. It’s here.
Okay, one last thing. This is the best footage of Saturday we’ve seen:
(Oh, and the Scottish Police Federation are now tweeting a crowd figure of 20,000.)
Okay, we’ve got a LOT of housekeeping-type stuff to get on with, so the next couple of days might be a wee bit quiet. We’ll need to be dealing with the ridiculous goings-on at the Labour conference this weekend at some point, but for now let’s just round up the last few issues regarding Saturday’s awesome independence march and rally and get it all out of the way.
We’ve already run a small collection of our own ham-fisted snapshots, but here are just a few of our favourite pics of yesterday’s rally in Edinburgh that were taken and sent to us by Wings Over Scotland readers.
Click all the pics for larger versions.
I didn’t take nearly enough photos. But there’ll be more coming from others.
What a day that was.
*bites tongue*
*bites tongue again, harder*
Right. Our chosen meeting place, it turns out, is “off-map” and likely to be frowned on by police, given its immediate proximity to the “VIP area” that we didn’t know existed until 20 minutes ago. And even though it’s probably too late now for many of the people who were planning on joining our group to see this post, it’ll likely cause fractionally less chaos to post it than to not.
We’ve been meaning to mention this curious extract from a “Please send us cash!” mailshot that “Better Together” sent out this week:
It’s the middle sentence that caught our eye. We’re reasonably sure that the Scottish Government isn’t allowed under either Electoral Commission or Scottish Parliament rules to “spend millions of pounds of public money on propaganda campaigns”.
And while we also know that there are very few rules about political organisations telling lies to voters, one of the few that DOES exist is a prohibition against falsehoods where “the specific statement in question is part of a direct solicitation for money”, which this quite clearly is.
We might just have to drop the ASA a wee line.
We just noticed this from The Observer in January 2012:
After David Cameron reignited the debate about independence a week ago, demanding that Scottish National party leader and Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, come clean over the timing and scope of a referendum, Darling was immediately punted as the best man to lead the “no” campaign. He is respected, he is not a Tory, and he is a fervent unionist. Perfect for the job. But he wants none of it.
A man whose word can clearly be relied on, there.
The Scotsman, 19 September 2013:
“Only one in ten voters would prefer the next General Election to result in another coalition government, a poll has found as Nick Clegg sought to convince voters it was in the country’s best interests. More than two thirds (67 per cent) would prefer to see an outright victory by one party.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
