Another surprising development 215
Posted on
August 31, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘comment’
Waving goodbye 408
Posted on
August 30, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.
Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.
What we’re reminded of 89
Posted on
August 29, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This is Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:
But with the greatest respect to Scotland’s pioneering engineers, they’re not the thing we’re reminded of when we hear Scottish Labour talking about the new bridge. This is what we’re reminded of.
Storming the nation 424
Posted on
August 27, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Sunday Times has a breathless account today of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant five-day tour of Scotland.
It sounds like quite the event.
The trouble with Corbyn 822
Posted on
August 14, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
(By the always-excellent Phantom Power Films.)
The grand sacrifice 251
Posted on
August 12, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The mainstream media is now, by our count, up to at least 13 sizeable articles on the Great Yes-Movement Schism Of 2017 – a minor online spat between a tiny handful of people who’ve never liked each other and most of whom the general public has never heard of – and shows no signs of tiring of gleefully revelling in the subject.
There’s nothing particularly surprising or even diabolical about that. As any reality-TV show viewer will tell you, viewers absolutely love to watch people fighting, and doubly so if it’s the summer silly season and there’s no real news. Most of the stories have attracted large responses and therefore lots of juicy and profitable clicks for tired hacks who long ago stopped having anything of any interest to say but still have to honk out 1000 words a week in order to get paid.
But the more sinister aspect of them is the way they’ve been weaponised to (further) demonise and silence the Yes movement. If someone attacks other Yes figures with a provocative, offensive and dishonest piece, the extra bonus for the media is that any legitimately angry response to it can be used as yet more proof of The Vileness Of The Cybernats: “Look! They even turn on their own if they dare disagree!”
For the Unionist press, that’s a win-win every way up, and there are some on the Yes side who seem only too willing to co-operate with the narrative.
The magic money rigs 388
Posted on
August 10, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A reader sent us an interesting snippet of information today.
That seemed a startling fact, so we looked into it. And it’s true.
The Vanishings 133
Posted on
August 09, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Scottish media this week has started to rather resemble Argentina under General Galtieri’s military junta – everywhere you look are the ghosts of the disappeared.
We’ve already documented at length the sudden non-existence of the Herald’s madly inaccurate front-page lead story from Monday (along with the corresponding piece in the Evening Times). And today two more things joined the missing list.
Forever bad 103
Posted on
August 09, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Daniel Sanderson in the Times in January this year, complaining that too few university students come from poor backgrounds and therefore the SNP are bad:
So he’d be chuffed if that situation improved, right?
The ever-shifting goalposts 46
Posted on
August 07, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re back in the archives again today, because there’s still no news. (The Herald is desperately trying to whip up outrage over trains arriving 61 seconds late, and David Torrance has finally turned up at the “OMG YES MOVEMENT SPLIT” party just as the last stragglers are heading home and the hosts are going to bed.)
And we’re particularly enjoying this one, for a whole list of reasons:
Out come the freaks 282
Posted on
August 06, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
In the continuing summer absence of any sort of Scottish politics news (the Sunday papers consist of Michelle Thomson understandably taking a swipe at the SNP in the Sunday Post, the Sunday Times spluttering in impotent fury that Michelle Thomson wasn’t prosecuted, and the Sunday Herald giving a glowing write-up to idiot Tory MSP Annie Wells while savaging sections of the Yes movement yet again – this time “older white men”), we thought you might enjoy a piece from the archives.
Discovered by an alert reader, this 1976 Times article features Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman discussing the seemingly-imminent prospect of Scottish devolution, to which he was implacably opposed and instrumental in defeating, ultimately leading to the collapse of a Labour government and the election of Mrs Thatcher.
