At Easter the prophet rose again 191
A message of hope for Good Friday from everyone’s favourite Labour activist:
A message of hope for Good Friday from everyone’s favourite Labour activist:
“Dry your eyes. On your feet.”
Sometimes the world’s random turns throw up a charmed piece of timing. That was the first tweet that I read on 19th September 2014, sitting on the side of the bed, eyes burning, wondering what on Earth I could possibly do with a day for which I’d bought champagne, but which broke my heart before dawn.
I’d resisted Twitter for a while, then fallen in love with it, weirdly comfortable with the disembodied voices of strangers. Small phrases, 140 characters: at its best, little postcards that made me smile, laugh or think.
For whatever reason, that tweet cut through, its arrival perfect to give me a virtual shake. I’d tell the writer – if I knew who they were – that I managed to carry out half of their instruction to us hollow-eyed, political orphans that day, though I failed miserably for a while on the first bit.
Today we should have become independent. We’re not, and it’s not okay, but since I don’t think we can ignore the power that time and timing can possess, and since words are all I’ve got, I’d like to tell you a story.
Two front pages in the same newspaper, two weeks apart.
The top image is Scotland within the UK. The bottom one is an independent Scotland.
£5 billion better off with independence? We’d call that a no-brainer.
We hadn’t heard of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust until today. It turns out that it’s a sister organisation to the highly admirable Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which does great work highlighting and fighting issues around poverty and social injustice.
The Reform Trust, not so much.
We’re very confused today.
Okay, so that’s all straightforward enough. The SNP are bad because they’re going to hit “middle Scotland” with more tax. Bunch of dangerous tax-and-spend lefties. Right?
Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already eviscerated its comically inept bumbling in detail, but we thought we’d just quickly give you a visual version.
From Kezia Dugdale’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference yesterday:
So hang on – only people born in Scotland are “Scottish”? Bit controversial. But then again, given Scottish Labour’s constant pejorative use of the word “foreigner” in recent years, we probably shouldn’t be shocked.
From a BBC report on the 2004 Scottish Labour conference:
And to give the former First Minister his due, he wasn’t wrong.
Here’s a tweet from Fraser Nelson of the Spectator this morning:
Now, we already know that’s complete drivel for at least five reasons. But it’s not the maddest thing about the point Nelson’s trying to make.
We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.
But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:
Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.
(Which is lucky, as they’re going to do it with money that doesn’t exist.)
They want to run the economy, folks. And there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland prepared to vote for them. We live in zany times.
From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:
“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.