Moodievision: Ask Nicola 124
Posted on
June 17, 2015 by
Greg Moodie
Archive for the ‘comment’
The broken promise 253
Posted on
June 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The first five words of “The Vow” – the solemn pledge made by all three UK party leaders on the eve of the independence referendum – are “The Scottish Parliament is permanent”. This is what happened in the House of Commons this evening when the UK government was asked to make good on that pledge.
The best and worst of times 183
Posted on
June 14, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With scarcely a moment’s pause for breath or reflection, the Unionist polity and media has seamlessly switched its focus to the elusive beast that is “Full Fiscal Autonomy”.
(The SNP thankfully seems to have swiftly dumped the silly and short-lived attempt to rebrand it “Full Fiscal Responsibility”.)
Having deemed the anti-independence “Project Fear” strategy a success because it won the referendum – seemingly oblivious to the fact that what it actually achieved was to turn a 30-point lead into a 10-point victory, at the cost of the annihilation of Unionist MPs in Scotland – the exact same tactics have been deployed against FFA.
And the main problem with that is that there are in fact two FFAs. And the Unionist side is fighting against the wrong one.
Sometimes it’s just a spade 189
Posted on
June 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
On the day Jim Murphy stands down as leader of the Labour Party North Britain branch office, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer our humble, heartfelt tribute to both him and the insightful political commentariat of Scotland.
Pick a card, any card 161
Posted on
June 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:
The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.
Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.
(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)
A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.
What happened next? 364
Posted on
June 11, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The grievance hunters 103
Posted on
June 11, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve already noted that today is a confusing news day. But when we were listening to the radio this morning we thought we maybe hadn’t woken up properly.
(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 June 2015)
.
The segment concerned a report by the Tory-leaning think tank Reform Scotland, and saw both the organisation and Labour MSP Hugh Henry trying doggedly to find a bad spin on the news in the fact that crime in Scotland is at a 40-year low. So desperate were they to do so that they ended up denying the existence of arithmetic.
The news is very confusing today 73
Posted on
June 11, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So first of all there’s this (click pic for full story):
…in which the figures appear to show that Iceland’s policy of imposing justice and imprisoning the greedy bankers who caused the world financial crash – rather than just shovelling money at them and letting them carry on robbing everyone – actually saw its economy recover at least as well as anywhere else’s.
But then things get more complicated.
The grinding wheels of justice 80
Posted on
June 10, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An update for those interested, via an alert cartoonist:
From: Garreth.Lodge
To: Christopher Cairns
Subject: RE: Ian Smart
Date: 9 June 2015 14:25:33 BST
Dear Christopher,
Thank you for your e-mail to Kezia with regards to her exchange with the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 23rd April 2015.
Kezia can confirm that the person mentioned in the exchange has had their membership of the Labour Party put under administrative suspension and an investigation is currently being conducted by the General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party.
If you have specific questions on the investigation you will need to direct them to the Scottish Labour Party, not Kezia’s Parliamentary office.
If there is anything other issues Kezia can help with as your MSP, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Kind Regards
Garreth
The impossible fantasy 206
Posted on
June 07, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The likely next Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on today’s Sunday Politics:
We’ll try to keep this brief, because we want to go to the seaside.
The scum of the Earth 271
Posted on
June 06, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.
There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).
We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.
The thickest of it 493
Posted on
June 04, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.
The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.
