An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.
And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
The slightly-less-well-known definition of “force” that means “a minority government persuading three out of four opposition parties to agree with it and democratically vote a measure through”, there.
This was us for most of yesterday:
Because we were genuinely concerned about this year’s fundraiser. It was coming off the back of our lowest traffic month in four years (February was absolutely dead in Scottish politics, and we had almost no internet for the last two weeks of it), and some other indy sites had had badly underachieving crowdfunders in recent months.
So it’s quite the pleasant surprise to be able to say that the total (direct donations as well as through the fundraising page) for the first 24 hours alone was… £72,429.
If you’re a person (unemployed or working) subsisting via state welfare in the UK, there can be no more genuinely, blood-runs-cold, terrifying phrase in the English language than a Tory saying they’ve come up with “fresh thinking” on poverty and benefits.
Because – and if you’re only going to trust us on one thing in your life, trust us on this – it never, ever means your life’s about to get better.
…for the relationship between the four “partner” nations of the UK presented itself at the weekend when BBC anchorman John Inverdale asked the Scottish rugby pundit and former international Andy Nicol “what does this do for self-belief from a Scottish perspective, Andy?”
Which was clearly pretty ironic in itself:
But alert readers may recall how that “epitome of Better Together” worked out.
After Scotland’s rugby team sent proud Edward (Jones)’s army homeward with some well-skelped erses from Murrayfield yesterday, it seemed like an opportune moment to reflect on this from just 12 years ago.
The full story is below.
A timely reminder about how much 85% of British people (or to put that another way, English people) really value the rest of the UK.
“Lead us, Scotland, don’t leave us!” is going to be a pretty hard sell next time.
Last week, just a day after we highlighted the disastrous sales collapse of the Daily Record during almost certainly the most tumultuous and eventful seven-year period in Scotland’s peacetime history, the paper’s editor-in-chief Murray Foote apparently took the Scottish newspaper industry by surprise by suddenly resigning his position.
(We’re sure, incidentally, this is entirely unconnected with the recent advertising of some senior media vacancies in Scottish Labour.)
Rival hacks dutifully issued a series of glowing tweets about what a smashing guy Foote was and how much he’d improved the paper during his 27-year tenure there in various positions, most recently editor-in-chief, group editor and deputy editor.
So even though Foote accused this site of “debasing public life” with “sewage politics, conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia” when we forced his paper to reluctantly and belatedly correct a massive front-page lie, we thought we’d join in the salutes.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
