It’s a really slow news day today, so here’s an extended report from the Met Office.
The outlook in the event of a No vote: this is as good as it gets.
Johann Lamont attracts a considerable amount of criticism – largely, it ought to be conceded, from SNP and Yes supporters, but also from the media – for her inability to deviate from her prepared text at First Minister’s Questions when the FM’s answer isn’t what she was expecting it to be.
But she’s not the only one in her party with that problem.
Here’s a story on the front page of the Guardian website.
Below is the headline you see when you actually click on the link.
As we noted last week, Eton- and Sandhurst-educated Sir Norman Arthur, figurehead of the No campaign’s latest high-powered grassroots fundraising drive, has a very impressive military record – Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, General Officer Commanding of the 3rd Armoured Division, General Officer Commanding of Scotland and mentioned in despatches during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
It’s just lucky the IRA didn’t have Twitter, or things might have been different.
Here’s a “Better Together” spokesman on Alex Salmond’s New Statesman lecture:
We were there. Want to know what he actually said about England?
So we’re just letting this one slide, are we?
The Edinburgh Agreement seems increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.
Sounds like Hands Across The Border might be struggling for recruits.
So how long before participation becomes a mandatory part of the Work Programme?
Does any of this sound familiar, readers?
When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):
“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”
The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.
So we can just forget about it, right?
Prominent New Labour writer Dan Hodges has a piece in the Telegraph today (because where else would a New Labour commentator have a column?) about UKIP now being an openly racist party. It contains the following passage:
We’ll leave aside that the protest was nothing to do with the SNP or Scottish nationalists, that it was organised by a radical left-wing group and that one of the two men arrested in connection with the incident was in fact English himself. None of those factual inconveniences are allowed to get in the way of Hodges’ bigotry.
If you missed it live, here’s the audio recording of the debate held at the Volunteer Rooms in Irvine on Friday. (The event wasn’t video-recorded, despite Clan Destiny Films having a high-quality camera team there, because the Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, Brian Donohoe, refused to give his permission.)
Click the image for the two-hour MP3 file.
This week’s edition of the Sunday Herald is a “referendum special” marking 200 days of the campaign to go (although actually it doesn’t have an awful lot more referendum coverage than a normal issue).
There are lots of things worth reading – as ever, we recommend spending a modest 69p for a digital copy via PressDisplay – but what really caught our eye were the two interviews with the heads of the Yes and No camps, Blairs Jenkins and McDougall.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
