This happened last night:
Despite having only raised £5,470 of its £50,000 target, the fundraiser set up by a veteran Lib Dem activist (or, in BBC language, an “Aberdeen woman”) was suddenly closed down, with no explanation offered.
So what do we know?
It’s a pretty widely-held axiom that supporters of independence rule the internet. While there are online No sites – mainly demented Loyalist affairs on Facebook – none of them has anything like the reach of even the middle-ranked Yes ones.
Where the independence movement has always trailed a long way behind is conventional media. For most of the modern era there hasn’t been a single newspaper or broadcast outlet that supported Yes. Now the Sunday Herald and The National have stepped into that space, with encouraging results, and NewsShaft are doing increasingly exciting things on air (though still web-based).
Clearly, though, more is needed, and one of the most impressive productions is one which has existed for almost a year already, but is curiously little-heralded.
Here’s Atul Hatwal, editor of the influential Labour website Labour Uncut, speaking first in July and then reviewing his position with the benefit of hindsight in August.
Corbyn just won the leadership election in the first round with 60% of the vote. Don’t give up the day job, Atul. Well, actually, maybe you should.
Today, readers, we’re slowly building our way up to an aneurysm trying to give away a fairly sizeable sum of money to foodbanks and other charities, who appear to have collectively decided that that should be an experience only slightly less challenging than the Krypton Factor assault course. (Ask your parents.)
While our nervous breakdown continues apace, we thought we’d draw your attention to this story in the Independent about how the new Conservative government has been avoiding putting any senior ministers up for questioning by the media.
It’s a tactic you may recall from the “Better Together” campaign, and we thought you might like to read this piece (and more here) by a videogame-journalism friend of ours which explains what’s going on when it happens.
We’ll hopefully be back with you soon.
To be honest, readers, this site isn’t very bothered about a bit of rudeness in politics. The sainted Aneurin Bevan, father of the NHS, once famously called the Tories “lower than vermin”, and his contemporary opponent Winston Churchill wasn’t averse to a few strong words either.
So long as nobody’s inciting violence, it’s our view that adults should be allowed to express dislike of each other in whatever terms they choose – at the end of the day, words are just sounds, and it’s absurdly irrational for a civilised species to arbitrarily pretend to take offence at the sounds “uck” or “unt” but not the sounds “urp” or “erk”.
So we’re not too fussed if dim-witted and boorish Conservative councillor Gordon McCaskill would “like to see” ISIS fanatics rape, behead or blow up Nicola Sturgeon. Unless he actively encourages or assists them to do it, he can think and say whatever he likes. That’s what free speech in a free country is supposed to be about. You don’t need to like something to defend it, as we demonstrated last week.
But our job is to monitor the media and the comical double standards thereof, and in particular the BBC, which is funded by taxpayers and which (unlike newspapers and other broadcasters) is supposed to be bound by law to impartiality and fairness.
And in the case of Cllr McCaskill, the leader of the Conservative group on East Renfrewshire Council who’s now been suspended by the Scottish Tories pending an investigation over his comments on Twitter on Monday, we suspect that alert readers won’t be entirely surprised by what we’ve observed.
We can’t help wondering if the Church Of England’s “Daily Prayer” this morning was chosen while looking north towards a certain Scottish Lib Dem MP in his time of trial.
If such things are your inclination, readers, pray for Alistair.
Summer is, as we’ve said before, the “silly season” for politics. Wings readers will have noticed that like everywhere else, we’ve been rather lighter on content than usual for the last three months as politicians celebrated their general election victories by giving themselves long holidays – sorry, “time for constituency work” – and in the absence of a referendum campaign to fill the gap there wasn’t much going on.
So we can’t blame the media for raking over old ground in search of anything to fill threadbare column inches with. But it’s less excusable when the things they choose to reheat, repackage and reissue are ancient, endlessly-disproven lies.
Party member. We’re sure Ruth Davidson (who follows him) will take prompt action.
She will, won’t she?
Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Parliament yesterday:
The daughter of two teachers, there.
Let’s start off by losing some more friends. This site has no time for the Gaelic lobby. The obsolete language spoken by just 0.9% of Scotland’s population might be part of the nation’s “cultural heritage”, but so were burning witches and replacing Highlanders with sheep and we don’t do those any more either.
Being multilingual is an excellent thing, but the significant amount of time and effort taken to learn a literally-pointless second language (because everyone you can talk to in Gaelic already understood English) would be vastly better directed to picking up one that was actually of some use, and every extra fraction of a second spent scanning a road sign trying to find the bit you can read is a fraction of a second spent with your eyes off the road.
Non-primary native languages are a tool whose main utility in practice is at best the exclusion of outsiders, and at worst an expression of dodgy blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism. They’re a barrier to communication and an irritation to the vast majority of the population, who are made to feel like uncultured aliens in their own land.
But we’d still rather put up with Gaelic than complete idiots making our laws.
We can’t help feeling there’s a simpler way of putting that.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
