We have a contest, ladies and gentlemen.
If only there was some way to illustrate that revitalisation, eh readers?
This week’s publication of party accounts by the Electoral Commission, along with a string of recent stories about election expenses, served as a reminder to anyone who might have forgotten that the SNP are still, despite 10 years in power, the massive underdogs in Scottish politics.
Labour and the Tories, in particular, can always rely on handouts from their UK parent parties, who are in turn funded by massive donations from trade unions and big business respectively. In 2016 Labour trousered almost £15m from donors (over and above their membership revenues of £14m), while the Tories pocketed almost £19m in donations from their rich pals.
The Nats, meanwhile, have to gather most of their money from membership fees, but have been able to stay competitive in the campaign-heavy climate of the 2010s (since the turn of the decade the SNP have had to fight three expensive UK general elections, two Holyrood elections, two council elections, a European election and two referendums – that’s ten major votes in seven and a half years) thanks largely to extra help from lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir.
And the fact that Scottish politics can be something like an even remotely fair fight still leaves Unionists raging furiously at the burning injustice of it all.
Ruth Davidson finally emerged today from a summer of hiding from press stories about her racist and sectarian councillors and MSPs to give a bizarre, nervy and gabbling interview to Good Morning Scotland.
Highlights included calling Show Racism The Red Card an “anti-Semitic” organisation and proposing the building of eight entire new towns in Scotland (the funding source and potential locations for this colossal undertaking were not specified), all filled with social housing which would nevertheless be for sale under Right To Buy.
(Which if it could somehow magically be done would of course lead to the homes being quickly sold at heavy discounts, leaving councils insufficient money to fund their replacements and creating another massive housing bubble and crisis.)
But our very favourite bit was when (at 2h 17m) she said this:
To be honest, readers, if we encountered a 30-sq-foot drunk waving a broken glass around in a pub, we’d just be looking for the door as fast as possible. But clearly Ruth Davidson frequents different sorts of bars to us.
So just for a bit of light-hearted Friday fun, we thought we’d ask: what WOULD you say to that person in that situation?
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.
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.
The Sunday Times has a breathless account today of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant five-day tour of Scotland.
It sounds like quite the event.
(By the always-excellent Phantom Power Films.)
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.
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 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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
