Patrick Harvie on a radio phone-in today, refusing to say if he knows what a woman is and refusing to guarantee them safety from men in women’s single-sex spaces.
Because this is a pure embarrassment from the notional main opposition leader. Even if it was all true – and we’d be very sceptical about that until we see the workings – £4.5 billion over 14 years would be £321 million a year.
That’s a substantial amount of money, but it’s also almost exactly 1% of the Scottish Government’s budget, and no government on Earth has ever had everything it attempted work out perfectly. Sustaining 99% efficiency on spending over nearly a decade and a half is actually pretty good going.
More to the point, it’s a staggeringly audacious attack line from a Westminster MP in a party whose government wasted £12 billion on ONE project in ONE year alone – the catastrophically failed COVID test-and-trace app.
(We’d still like someone to explain to us how in the world you can possibly spend £12 billion in a few months on a mobile phone app, even if it had worked.)
Just over a hundred years ago, the rights of women in the UK were still entirely decided by men. Women didn’t have the vote (a small minority would be given it in 1918, but most would have another decade to wait), there were no women in Parliament, and women basically had no say in anything that happened.
Record scratch and jump-cut to the present day.
That’s Kirsty Blackman, an SNP MP elected in 2015 who wouldn’t even have been allowed to stand for election a hundred years earlier, and who seems determined to take women’s rights back to that century.
It really is deeply dispiriting the see the level of utter burning contempt in which Nicola Sturgeon holds the independence movement, if this is the sort of ludicrously insulting garbage she thinks it’ll swallow.
The BBC’s coverage of the Scottish election campaign and what has been described as its “virtual blackout” of ALBA will be the subject of special Ofcom election Committee hearing on Friday 23rd April.
We imagine people may wish to read the Alba Party manifesto.
It can be downloaded by clicking the link above. Had we formed our own party it’s pretty much the manifesto we’d have written, and we especially endorse the gorgeous pooch on the front.
The First Minister released a short film this week.
While it has the character of a hostage video, with terrorists just off-camera pointing a gun at the unfortunate victim and forcing them to read out a pre-prepared text, sadly we doubt that was the case. We think this is really what she believes and intends.
We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.
By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.
He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.
(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)
So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.
So-called “puberty blockers” – the class of drugs that were used to “chemically castrate” computing pioneer Alan Turing for being homosexual (a crime in the UK in the 1950s), which is believed to have led to his suicide by cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 are extremely dangerous.
Scotland’s only gender clinic, the Sandyford, had to apologise just a few months ago for having concealed the very serious hazards posed by the drugs. But it has no plans to stop prescribing them to under-16s.
And the Scottish Government refuses to intervene in the matter.
Alf Baird on Clocks And Calendars: “Colonial armies were created by English imperial rule from many annexed territories and peoples, of which the Indian army was…” Apr 2, 19:36
Andy Storrie on Clocks And Calendars: “A lengthy and irrelevant diatribe about a London-supporting party who abandoned their traditional base in 1997! Nae good, son. It…” Apr 2, 17:53
Young Lochinvar on Clocks And Calendars: “Beggars Really? He’s running out of super expensive ordnance, “gas” at American pumps is over $4 and mid terms are…” Apr 2, 16:21
Captain Caveman on Clocks And Calendars: ““Fraid the great colonisation era was British, not English. Many Irish and Scots took major parts in this process but…” Apr 2, 15:45
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: “Powerful picture driven propaganda and stunning visual rhetoric. Hollywood has a rival… and it’s kicking Turtle Island’s top Turtle’s arse.” Apr 2, 15:26
Captain Caveman on Clocks And Calendars: “Ah, but you’re forgetting something, Aidan. On the one hand, we have the poor man’s own family, as well as…” Apr 2, 15:14
Alf Baird on Clocks And Calendars: ““Type A. The greedy, brutal, thieving, scummy, devious, cruel & demonic kind.” Seems a fair definition of colonialism, and what…” Apr 2, 15:12
Geri on Clocks And Calendars: “Look out for the one with Trump & his allies dressed as teletubbies dancing tae gay music – while P,…” Apr 2, 14:58
Aidan on Clocks And Calendars: “This has been covered at length by people within the independence movement and his family who are adamant that it…” Apr 2, 14:47
Geri on Clocks And Calendars: “Areswipe, Naw I dinnie know. Why don’t you explain tae the group how someone can shoot themselves twice in the…” Apr 2, 13:43
James on Clocks And Calendars: ““….The death of Willie McRae has been investigated thoroughly and there is no evidence that he was murdered by the…” Apr 2, 13:43
Confused on Clocks And Calendars: “the “south park” ayatollahs have put out a banger (as it were …) www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUJGXC4oNOA www.youtube.com/shorts/bdDqVk-MpRY www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAbsKw7f3DU” Apr 2, 13:42
Rob on Clocks And Calendars: “Got to laugh at some of the comments above, particularly the ones about type a and type b peoples and…” Apr 2, 13:41
Confused on Clocks And Calendars: “another nonce scandal at the bbc, whodathunkit, no one saw that coming does not surprise me tell you what though,…” Apr 2, 13:40
Geri on Clocks And Calendars: “The snaw globes are birrlin wi that yin. King o the commode.. USA thinks aww those wee countries are jist…” Apr 2, 13:31
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: “Turtle Island’s amphibian special forces outfit, the Navy Turtles, are gearing up, Turtle-style, to tackle the anti-Turtle threat that is…” Apr 2, 13:04
Mark Beggan on Clocks And Calendars: “Baby Senator Kennedy says ‘Let me just say for the record my Aunts Facebook page has more credibility than you…” Apr 2, 12:52
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: ““The death of Willie McRae has been investigated thoroughly…” Yes, indeed… and by the very folk who murdered him to…” Apr 2, 12:26
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: ““Care to set out a list of countries to go in Type A…” Top of the imperial coloniZing A-listers is….…” Apr 2, 12:19
Aidan on Clocks And Calendars: “Care to set out a list of countries to go in Type A and Type B Geri?” Apr 2, 12:04
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: “Thon mad, bad and balding man-baby boss-man, King of the Turtles and Chief of Turtle Island… that top Turtillian, Donny…” Apr 2, 12:00
Aidan on Clocks And Calendars: “The death of Willie McRae has been investigated thoroughly and there is no evidence that he was murdered by the…” Apr 2, 11:35
Geri on Clocks And Calendars: “Aye, There really are just two types of ppl in the world. Type A. The greedy, brutal, thieving, scummy, devious,…” Apr 2, 11:25
Mark Beggan on Clocks And Calendars: “Don’t take Trump literally take Trump seriously or you might find yourself in the stone age.” Apr 2, 11:24
TURABDIN on Clocks And Calendars: “Your knowledge of both Irish & Scottish history is worthy of the badly trained AI bot. In the 18c Scotland…” Apr 2, 10:55
TURABDIN on Clocks And Calendars: “From PETER A BELL…..«That the “legal and constitutional” route does exist in Scotland’s own legal and constitutional environment will be…” Apr 2, 10:42
Geri on Clocks And Calendars: “Ach, Breastplate Now you know as well as I do that we have the wrong kinda oil. Tsk! It’s worthless,…” Apr 2, 10:33
Breastplate on Clocks And Calendars: “Yes, James, There’s no sense of irony or hypocrisy from Mark. Of course Scotland has oil and of course, they…” Apr 2, 09:50
Northcode on Clocks And Calendars: “A hae the urge tae tak aboot the Americas, aye, and in the Scots leid, tae… maistly onywey. It sud…” Apr 2, 09:42