Well done to everyone who correctly guessed that our Mystery Guest last night was indeed Ruth Davidson. If you’d like to listen to Ruth’s 2009 demo reel for voiceover work which accompanied the letter, click the image below.
From that to the leader of a major Scottish political party in just two years. Hats off.
Dear Yes Scotland,
Please immediately contact Channel 5 and ask them how much they want for this:
Pay any price they ask, and show it on September 17th. 100% Yes, in the bag.
…so beloved of John McTernan are on this particular occasion myself, Michael Greenwell, Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell and the SNP’s Natalie McGarry, blethering away yesterday on the For A’That podcast.
If you’ve got nothing better to do for 61 minutes, you could always have a listen.
If you click the image below, you can listen to just over nine minutes of Johann Lamont – whose £85,000 salary you pay – on “Good Morning Scotland” earlier today.
Presenter Gary Robertson does about as good a job of questioning the Scottish Labour “leader” (never before have the inverted commas we habitually put around that word rung so true) as anyone could ask, so no criticism can be attached to him.
But after you’ve listened to all nine minutes, can anyone tell us a single actual fact we’ve learned about the Labour Party in Falkirk that we didn’t know before?
Blair McDougall, director of “Better Together”, Dundee University, 30 October 2013:
You heard it straight from the horse’s – well, let’s be kind and say “mouth”, folks.
We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.
First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.
Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.
(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)
We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.
And this one might just take the entire cake stand and banana hanger.
It’s former Tory MP and junior minister Edwina Currie, speaking about someone called “Alex Salmon” on Radio 5’s Stephen Nolan show on Saturday. (From 2h 16m on that iPlayer link.) We do recommend listening to all six-and-a-half minutes. It sets a very high standard from the off, but somehow maintains it the whole way through. Enjoy.
Those clued-up, cutting-edge sorts among you who follow our Twitter account will have seen this last night, but it definitely needs to reach a bigger audience.
It’s a recording of a meeting held by Clydebank TUC earlier this month on the subject of whether the working class should support independence. The working class is the sector of the Scottish public whose voice is least heard in the debate (which is largely dominated by middle-class media-intellectual sorts), and perhaps not coincidentally is the demographic which tends to favour independence most strongly.
The footage is raw and often angry, and readers sensitive to adult language might wish to steer clear. Anas Sarwar probably wishes he’d done the same.
Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.
(Click the image for the full audio.)
As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)
His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.
If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.
To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.
Yesterday we pointed out a pretty disgraceful misrepresentation by Labour of the findings of an impartial, non-political research study which found that an independent Scotland would be far better placed to reduce inequality. But it wasn’t the only one.
Here’s the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, speaking at yesterday’s interesting two-hour BBC Radio 5 Live debate (for some reason that link only shows the last 50 minutes, although the earlier part had been televised too) at the Fruitmarket in Glasgow on the subject of child poverty.
We say “speaking”. We mean “lying”. In Sarwar’s case the words are interchangeable.
Click the image below to listen to the last two-and-a-half minutes of Scotland Tonight’s special referendum debate on the subject of welfare.
If you want to give yourself a hollow laugh, count the number of times Anas Sarwar says “I’m going to answer that question”, and then doesn’t answer the question.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
