Standing up for falling down 121
Posted on
November 02, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Kezia Dugdale back in August:
So thank goodness that’s all been cleared up.
Archive for the ‘comment’
A difference of recollection 60
Posted on
November 01, 2015 by
Gordon Macintyre-Kemp
Dear Wings Over Scotland,
It’s been brought to my attention that you recently shared a quote attributed to the TV presenter and Westminster political commentator Andrew Neil, and that in response Mr Neil has strongly denied making the statement in the quote, namely:
“Devolution, the Calman Commission, the Scotland Bill, the Edinburgh Agreement – all of this and more you have is because Westminster parties are scared of the SNP. If you vote ‘No’ you massively change the balance of power and they will not only give you nothing, but will probably take powers away from the Scottish Parliament”.
I find it very strange that he denies making that statement.
God save your mad parade 168
Posted on
October 31, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
When we watched Kezia Dugdale’s toe-curling moment on this week’s Question Time, we were immediately reminded of a mesmerising passage in Jon Savage’s masterful 1991 history of punk rock “England’s Dreaming”, in which he gives an account of the last ever Sex Pistols concert, at Winterland in San Francisco in 1978.
And like the show, Dugdale’s week just kept getting worse.
The missing paragraph 136
Posted on
October 30, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:
Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.
Why we love Twitter 408
Posted on
October 29, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Daily Mail this morning:
“We’re not like the SNP. This isn’t a party of robots that are given a chip and told what to think.”
Twitter’s response is below.
The wishful believers 417
Posted on
October 28, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.
The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.
“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.
But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.
Words without meanings 114
Posted on
October 27, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Labour put out a press release yesterday a few hours before the tax credits fiasco. It concerned the much-ballyhooed new arrangements for Scottish Labour “autonomy”, of exactly the sort that the branch office has been telling us it already had ever since the election of Johann Lamont as leader in 2011.
We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.
The Abstainers Ride Again 140
Posted on
October 26, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A question for Andrew Neil 175
Posted on
October 25, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers who follow our Twitter account, like all sensible people do, may have noticed we’ve had a few exchanges with the BBC presenter Andrew Neil since we published a couple of articles about his interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson on The Sunday Politics last week.
The debate centred around a claim Neil put to Robertson:
“You go on and on, your party, about ‘austerity, austerity’ – how much has the Scottish Government budget been cut in the past five or six years? […] In real terms there’s been no cut.“
It seems fair to say the matter’s been in some dispute since then.
The Illogical Song 194
Posted on
October 24, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Kezia Dugdale talking about her dad in today’s Scotsman:
Just a couple of things.
Vile abuse and harmless banter 299
Posted on
October 22, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
In that order, we presume.
Two kinds of lies 203
Posted on
October 22, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.
First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:
This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.
