How soon isn’t now? 524
Posted on
March 16, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘comment’
A unique opportunity to escape 76
Posted on
March 15, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
No 8: Elizabeth, from Bonnybridge.
Some things are simple 428
Posted on
March 14, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Great news, Mrs Hudson 325
Posted on
March 13, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re going to need to print more books.
The incredible persistence of stupidity 88
Posted on
March 12, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We saw this exchange on Twitter this morning, involving left-wing Labour activist Eoin Clarke, a reader, and Scottish Labour list MSP Elaine Smith.
Smith professed to find it “unbelievable” and “scary” that the reader thought he’d had Tory governments for most of his lifetime. (We asked him how old he was and he said 34, which means he’s had Tory governments for 62% of his life, so that checks out.)
But it’s a standard Scottish Labour line that there’s no real difference between Scottish and English voters in terms of favouring left-wing politics, so we thought we’d just quickly check the arithmetic on that. The results are unlikely to shock you.
If you thought Willie Rennie was funny 182
Posted on
March 11, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
…on Good Morning Scotland yesterday, then we suspect you’re going to love the Lib Dems’ heroically glaikit MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton on the same show today.
(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 March 2017)
.
Our favourite line is probably “the SNP didn’t win an election”, although it’s run quite close by “If you listen to Christine Jardine”.
That’s that one sorted, then 192
Posted on
March 10, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We joke, of course. The Spanish government has made this position abundantly plain several times over a number of years, and it still doesn’t stop idiot Yoons (and media pundits who should know better) from spouting it.
But this time, in the flesh, it’s really quite hard to spin a way out of.
A great form of empowerment 94
Posted on
March 09, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
No.7: Erin, 15, from Gullane.
More than numbers 208
Posted on
March 09, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
First Minister’s Questions today (featuring stand-in FM John Swinney in a theatrical mood) was one long howl of “TOO WEE AND TOO POOR!”, with both Ruth Davidson and Kezia Dugdale using all of their questions to hark back to oil revenue forecasts from 2013 and insist that an independent Scotland would face economic apocalypse.
It was a dispiriting spectacle, and we found ourselves experiencing (not for the first time) pangs of sympathy for the remaining tiny rump of Scottish Labour voters, who must surely watch in broken despair at the antics of the hapless pack of squawking diddies representing their views in the Parliament.
But on the day that a new Ipsos MORI poll for STV found support for independence leaping to fractionally over 50%, we wondered how big a deal the economy really was for voters. And fortunately, we already knew the answer.
How it was meant to be 240
Posted on
March 08, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Today the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens all teamed up to pass a meaningless Holyrood motion declaring that the minority SNP government was a load of rubbish and smelled of toilets and its mum was fat and ugly.
(As an alert reader wryly noted: “Well, that’s a first. A one party state raises a motion against its own policy and defeats itself.”)
And we thought you’d like to be reminded that the Scottish Parliament was expressly designed from the beginning so that it would always work like that.
They must be pretty chuffed with how it’s turned out.
The Flounce-And-Bounce Counts 144
Posted on
March 08, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We haven’t said much about the huge furore whipped up by the Guardian in recent days around spurious allegations of racism/online abuse by supporters of Scottish independence, made first by Sadiq Khan and then by a deranged “Better Together” activist who also thinks all vegans are racist (or something).
Partly that’s because we covered the initial speech by Khan and the fallout from it pretty extensively, and partly because we didn’t want to feed the Guardian’s clickbait.
However, when the activist who was allegedly “hounded off Twitter” in fear for her life – fear caused by supposed comments that nobody has actually seen – miraculously recovered her bravery less than a week later (coincidentally just in time for the launch of her book), we thought it was probably time someone started keeping some records.
