Here are two snippets from a couple of recent “Better Together” leaflets:
Curiously, that 16% increase has fallen to 13% in their latest “briefing” full of made-up numbers Blair McDougall has pulled out of – well, let’s be polite and say “thin air”. But since they’ve been specifically named, let’s just check the claim with Tesco.
…you probably write for the Express.
Yesterday we posted a couple of tweets observing the fact that the Scottish media had conspicuously ignored the phenomenon that is The Wee Blue Book. (We’d have made more of the total blanking had we been even a little bit surprised.)
Despite having extensively reported almost every other document published about the referendum debate (such as Sir Tom Hunter’s almost-impenetrable digital-only effort), the press saw nothing at all newsworthy about a 72-page book that’s been downloaded over 400,000 times online and which a small team of complete amateurs had managed to fund, print and distribute more than 250,000 physical copies of in a matter of days, with demand still far outstripping supply.
But it turned out we were being a little unfair.
Bill Leckie in the Scottish Sun, 4 September 2014:
“I still have a list of nagging doubts, not least over who emerges to lead this new state. It’s just that… well, whereas not so long ago these doubts were what held me back, today they somehow seem exciting.
From industry recruitment website oilandgaspeople.com today:
Another 100 years? A trillion pounds? When will this curse be lifted from Scotland?
Here’s the BBC News website quoting defence secretary Michael Fallon today, on the announcement of a £3.5 billion order for almost 600 new armoured vehicles:
Let’s study that for a moment, shall we?
If anyone was still harbouring any doubts as to the significance of last night’s poll news, they would surely have been dispelled by this serious, thought-provoking and perceptive analysis on the BBC news channel’s “The Papers” roundup last night.
Of course, the poll might be a rogue. It might just be a temporary bounce from the second Salmond-Darling debate. And it still shows No in front. The Yes campaign will have to redouble its efforts in the last couple of weeks, not start congratulating itself.
But the one thing we can surely all agree on, right across the political divides, is that the most important aspect is whether someone might at some point have been slightly rude to Andrew Lloyd Webber on Twitter or not.
The rather sour Times leader linked in the tweet doesn’t actually specify the numbers, and the poll isn’t officially released yet as we write this, but we’d been hearing rumours of a Y47 N53 (excl. DKs) for a little while beforehand, so it looks like they were true.
Less than a month ago, YG stood at Y39 N61. If these numbers are confirmed, that’s a colossal 8% swing in three weeks, from the most No-friendly pollster around.
Game, as they say, on.
We thought this deserved a wider audience after the Herald’s appalling front-page lead scare story today by Michael Settle and Kate Devlin, channelling Jim Murphy MP:
“SCOTTISH POLICE FEDERATION
5 Woodside Place, Glasgow, G3 7QFTo: News Editor
Date: 1 September 2014
Subject: Independence Referendum
Oooft. ‘Nuff said.
The Daily Record, 27 Aug 2014:
And Mr Brown again in the Observer, 31 August 2014:
They want to cut corporation tax by 3p in the pound. That’s less for health and pensions, not more.”
Veteran readers will know where we’re going next.
Last week, Yes voters only hated their families, not Scotland.
This week it’s both. Can you feel the fear, readers?
So worn-down are we by the job of scrutinising Scotland’s exhaustingly terrible media for three years for you, our beloved readers, that we often can’t bring ourselves to watch current-affairs shows live any more, steeling ourselves to catch up with them on iPlayer only if people say there was something of particular note on them.
We’re glad we didn’t miss this, though. Because it might be the case that no politician in human history has ever been as hopelessly, pitiably, comically out of his depth as Willie Rennie was on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
