As the Prime Minister prepares to meet the First Minister and doggedly give her “now is not the time” mantra another few dozen run-throughs for the cameras, we thought that you might enjoy a little trip down Memory Lane.
Ah, the old days.
No.10: Jackie Kemp, journalist.
Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:
Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.
There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.
It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.
Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.
And it’s not hard to see why.
It seems counter-intuitive – given Rupert Murdoch’s often-overstated (despite endless and fevered speculation, the Scottish Sun didn’t back a Yes vote) but still seemingly real support for Scottish independence – that Sky News should be seen as the most hostile of the nation’s broadcasters to the Yes movement.
Yet such it is.
Panelbase have released data tables for their recent Sunday Times poll. And wow.
That’s quite something.
No 9: Mark, until recently from London.
No 8: Elizabeth, from Bonnybridge.
Judging by the first 24 hours, we’re in for a two-year festival of utter horror from the UK and Scottish media. Yesterday saw a never-ending parade of metrosplaining idiots dragged willingly in front of cameras and microphones to pontificate their clueless and mind-numbingly ignorant drivel about Scotland.
It wasn’t possible to keep track of it all, because it was frequently happening on five channels at once, and it was harder still to watch it for any extended period of time without hurling a brick through the screen in frustration at the offensive stupidity of it.
Feeding into that was a stream of Scottish politicians who actually did know better, but who are too catastrophically dim to adapt to changing circumstances and had no strategy other than to endlessly repeat the same cretinous soundbites over and over.
(Adam Tomkins in particular was ubiquitous, spending what felt like several hours on various airwaves reciting the same brainless 10-second schtick forever.)
The constitutional politics of the UK and Scotland are in flux, and many aspects of the situation are complicated. But quite a lot of them aren’t, and if we’re all going to make it through the next two years without stabbing each other in the throat, it’d be a lot better if everyone accepted the things that are definite, empirical, indisputable facts.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
