The lion’s share 63
Posted on
March 11, 2017 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘comment’
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.
Something deep in the gut 347
Posted on
March 06, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
No.6: Christopher, from Stirling, biker.
A flock of albatrosses 270
Posted on
March 06, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last year, as we’ve done a number of times in the past, we wrote about the dangers of handcuffing the independence movement to a particular narrow political agenda. Conflating a Yes vote with a number of hardline ideological positions which are more or less unquestioned within the liberal commentariat and the radical left, but actually highly unpopular with the general public, is self-evidently a huge strategic mistake.
Many of those positions are ones which this site supports in their own right, such as abolition of the monarchy and the abandonment of nuclear weapons, but our stance has always been that those arguments – like membership of the EU and NATO – are ones which ought properly to be conducted among the people and elected politicians of an independent Scotland in their own good time, not imposed without debate as part of the package of independence.
This weekend the notionally pro-independence Sunday Herald newspaper – as well as taking part in a media-wide Unionist smear campaign against this site and defending a “Better Together” activist who’d written a deeply offensive clickbait Guardian article claiming that Scottish nationalism was racist – carried a front cover and inside spread on the heated topic of mandatory gender quotas, which the paper supports.
As it happened we’d asked about the subject in our Panelbase poll last month.
A remarkable feat 426
Posted on
March 01, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So it turns out that this:
…is even more amazing than it initially appears.
The morality of nationalism 118
Posted on
February 26, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
No.5: Tom Morton, former BBC broadcaster and No campaigner.
The Weasel 139
Posted on
February 26, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s important to note, firstly, that the version of Sadiq Khan’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference he tweeted on Saturday morning simply flat-out said that Scottish nationalists were the same as racists and sectarian bigots. Its meaning was as clear as crystal to the Daily Record, a newspaper which is hardly hostile to Khan’s party.
“No difference” is a stark and unambiguous phrase. The speech did not contain the hastily-added qualifiers about “in this respect” and “of course I’m not saying the SNP are racist” which suddenly appeared when he read it out onstage that afternoon.
But which version did he really mean?
