The Sirens 329
Posted on
February 04, 2017 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘comment’
Bringing it on 374
Posted on
February 02, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
These are the comments of UK defence secretary Michael Fallon in a short interview with today’s Herald. We don’t know about you, folks, but to us it feels like Christmas.
We think our favourite line is “There are other voices in Scotland now, not least Ruth Davidson’s”, but there are a lot to choose from.
In the dead of the night 335
Posted on
February 01, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This is Conservative MP Dominic Raab, a member of the Brexit Select Committee, speaking on the BBC News Channel’s “Hard Talk” programme at 00.45 this morning. Perhaps imagining that nobody would be watching at such an ungodly hour, it seems he felt able to be unusually candid.
We left the last bit on in order to demonstrate that he was still talking about Scotland as well as Ireland. (He went on to recite the usual boilerplate about all leaving together as the UK etc etc, you can watch the whole show for yourself on iPlayer.)
But let’s just get that key early exchange down in writing for the record.
The funeral pyre 172
Posted on
January 31, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Readers familiar with our standing advice to newspaper customers that the headline is nearly always a lie might like to consider today’s Press & Journal.
The word “pyre” comes from the Greek word “pyra”, meaning “fire”. Surprisingly, it’s NOT the same root as “Pyrrhic”, as in “Pyrrhic victory”, meaning one that’s achieved by metaphorically burning your own city down. (Which in fact is named after the Greek general Pyrrhus of Epirus.)
But why the etymology lesson?
Not you, Scotland 149
Posted on
January 31, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Time catches up with us all 342
Posted on
January 29, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
While the truth gets its boots on 367
Posted on
January 25, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Alex Salmond on last night’s Newsnight:
Let’s just quickly fact-check that claim.
Fooled you again 564
Posted on
January 24, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With their bombs and their guns 282
Posted on
January 23, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We followed with interest an exchange over the weekend between Times columnist Kenny Farquharson and the anti-Brexit QC Jolyon Maugham, regarding the difference between the UK government’s insistence that there won’t be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because of the UK leaving the EU, and its continued insistence that there WOULD have to be one between the rUK and an independent Scotland, despite the legal circumstances being indistinguishable.
Farquharson, who like much of the Scottish political commentariat clings doggedly to the implausible dream of a “federal” UK, was adamant that the rules would – and indeed that they should – be different for the two ostensibly identical situations, and his given reason was a deeply disturbing one.
Kenny, it seems, thinks Scottish nationalists should do a lot more murdering.
The Template 233
Posted on
January 22, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Actual Scottish politics news continues to be thinner on the ground than the crowds at a Donald Trump inauguration, so we sympathise once more with the gentle souls of the Scottish press as they endeavour to fill empty pages without doing anything more journalistically strenuous than slightly rewording a Labour or Tory press release.
Fortunately for us, of course, we’ve always got their dismal efforts to talk about.
We need to talk about the oil 255
Posted on
January 21, 2017 by
Alan Brown
The link between the rise of modern Scottish nationalism and the production of North Sea oil is pretty indisputable. Both took off in the early seventies, with that decade’s campaigns powered by the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil” and it’s still a given in media circles that the desirability or even the feasibility of Scottish self-government depends principally on the spot price of Brent crude.
I’ve always found that argument a bizarre one, firstly because it takes no account of people’s emotional attachments to either the UK or Scotland, and secondly because as this site has repeatedly pointed out Scotland is both a producer and consumer of hydrocarbon fuels, so low or high prices are neither an unalloyed good or an unalloyed bad thing for her citizens.
What is incontestable is that the revenue from 45 years of North Sea production has not been well managed by the United Kingdom in comparison to the other states who have benefited from this bounty.
So far so uncontentious.
Outside of constitutional questions, party politics in Scotland revolves around health, education and jobs, with every party more or less in favour of all three. But what if there was an existential threat not just to this trinity but to our entire way of life? Where would that fit in to our politics?
The next pages of the script 203
Posted on
January 20, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s morning in America, readers.
Judge Dredd: Origins was published in 2007, although in fact the basic story of how Bad Bob Booth became the last President of the USA and what he did next was established right back at the 1970s beginnings of Dredd’s parent comic 2000AD.
We actually have a theory that it’s all the Lib Dems’ fault.
