We thought we might leave this here so that Scottish journalists could print it out and stick it on their monitors as a memory aid. It’s something they keep unaccountably forgetting for some reason.
You never know, it might just cheer them up a bit.
Despite what you may have read in the newspapers at the weekend (and then in the Daily Record a day later), Scotland was today rocked by the news that the SNP’s manifesto for this May’s general election in fact DOES contain a commitment to a second independence referendum within the term of the coming Scottish Parliament.
Who says so? Why, it’s Oliver Mundell, son of the only Conservative MP in Scotland and the Scottish Tory candidate for the Holyrood seat of Dumfriesshire, in a leaflet hitting the doorsteps of constituents in the Borders today.
So, y’know, that must be true.
From a speech by David Mundell today:
This is what a man who REALLY doesn’t want to answer a question looks like.
As we noted on Tuesday, Scottish Labour’s opening election salvo for 2016 has been to blame the Scottish Government for unaffordable house prices.
Of the 450 most obvious flaws in that argument, not least the extraordinary efforts a 13-year Labour government went to to keep the housing bubble inflated, the one that caught our eye was that in the past three years we were regularly told of one thing that definitely WOULD bring prices down dramatically, but which Labour pathologically fought every step of the way.
(And the rest of the “pro-indy left”.)
If you’re primarily or solely contesting regional seats, and you’re chiefly (as seems to be the case) targeting people who are going to use their first vote for the SNP, “Vote for us so that we can provide strong opposition to the SNP” is a pretty weird pitch.
You’re basically asking people to use their second vote to cancel out their first. And that’s quite a tough angle to be trying to sell them. Just saying, like.
It’s always good to see someone take a strong moral stand.
When indeed, eh?
So, this appeared in the Herald today:
And that’s a problem, because it’s a complete and utter lie.
The Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter has had some wise words to say on the subject of social media in the past few weeks, most recently on New Year’s Day:
The month before, though, he’d been even more to the point.
Below is a very interesting 13-minute chat from this afternoon’s John Beattie Show on Radio Scotland, also featuring Stuart Cosgrove (presenter of the excellent footy prog Off The Ball) and Eamonn O’Neill, who we presume is this Eamonn O’Neill.
Naturally we like it because there’s mention of Wings, which – for just about the first time we can recall on broadcast media in our four-year life – isn’t about how vile and awful we are, but the whole thing is much more wide-ranging and well worth a listen.
(The line “The media the media doesn’t like to talk about” is Beattie’s, not ours.)
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
