A story told in pictures 107
Posted on
April 19, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘comment’
Trampling on graves 540
Posted on
April 17, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last night – at the insistence of the SNP – the House Of Commons held a six-hour emergency debate in the wake of the UK’s unquestionably illegal bombing of Syria at the weekend, under the supposed justification of a chemical attack that may well not have happened at all, far less have been the responsibility of the unfortunate country’s murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad.
(Loony left-wing conspiracy theorists casting doubt on Assad’s responsibility for what happened – or didn’t happen – in Douma include, er, Major General Jonathan Shaw, the former head of the UK’s special forces, and Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord under Tony Blair and Minister For Security And Counter-Terrorism in Gordon Brown’s government.)
The debate concluded with a token vote, not on whether the bombing was right or wrong but which merely asserted whether Parliament had “considered” the subject. (ie voting that it had NOT done so would have made a statement that the Prime Minister acted improperly by committing UK forces to a conflict without obtaining MPs’ assent.)
Faced with the opportunity to issue a symbolic public rebuke to the government for bypassing Parliament on a matter of war and breaking international law, the radical socialist opposition Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn… abstained.
Desperate fishwives 538
Posted on
April 14, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Scotland’s political opposition and media, today:
There can surely be no country on Earth cursed and plagued with a more pathetic shower of petty, whining, gossiping harpies in those roles than Scotland. And while we knew that already, barely a day seems to go by without them reaching a new nadir.
If you’ve got the stomach to hear about the latest low point, grit your teeth, lower your expectations of humanity considerably and read on.
The wrong end of the telescope 184
Posted on
April 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:
As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.
But that wasn’t the weird bit.
Buying democracy 149
Posted on
April 03, 2018 by
Dr Craig Dalzell
“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”
[click]
The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.
Break out the whitewash 234
Posted on
March 28, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last week we dropped the Electoral Commission a short line to see if there’d been any progress in their investigation into our revelations of last December about the extremist loongroup Scotland In Union’s funding. Today we got a reply:
So just to clarify: an organisation whose specific stated purpose is to fight elections, and which has been a registered campaigner in several general elections, spending tens of thousands of pounds at a time, has raised over £600,000 in mainly large donations from wealthy and secretive donors since 2015 – a period where there has hardly ever NOT been an election going on in which spending and donations were regulated – and yet not one single penny of it has been declarable income.
That’s… interesting. We’ve asked the EC if any further detail will be forthcoming.
If the Scots had won 44
Posted on
March 28, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There was (unintentionally, we presume) a very revealing turn of phrase used by Tory MEP Jacqueline Foster on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland:
(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 28 March 2018)
.
“Scotland held a referendum on independence a couple of years earlier, and if the Scots had won that referendum to leave the United Kingdom, they’d have left the European Union.”
We suppose it’s nice that even the Tories finally agree that Scotland lost by voting No. But it’s interesting to hear that apparently there has never been any way for Scots to stay in the EU – if they voted Yes in 2014 they were out, if they voted No in 2014 they were out, and even though they voted Remain in 2016 they’re going out.
Any fair-minded democrat would surely then accept that Scotland’s voters deserve one chance to actually make that choice in a meaningful way, no?
Pie in your face 218
Posted on
March 23, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With regard to this, some important commentary:
(And some more.)
