Just a couple of short extracts from a chilling article on Labour Uncut this afternoon to give you that feelgood Friday-afternoon vibe.
The papers, as you’d expect, take some differing views today of John Swinney’s draft Scottish Government budget, delivered in the Holyrood chamber yesterday. But two articles in particular caught our eye.
We wish we were joking. But we’re not.
As you can perhaps tell, we’re starting to run out of post titles referencing “1984” and the Ingsoc habit of rewriting newspaper versions of history to pretend that certain things which happened didn’t happen, and vice versa. Here’s today’s case in point:
Wait a minute – “shifts to”? Are we sure about that?
The Scottish and UK press are both leading today with coverage of the intervention in the bedroom tax debate by UN special investigator Raquel Rolnik (below).
The Guardian (which is also sharp enough to pick up government housing minister Grant Shapps’ extraordinarily petulant response on radio and TV this morning) and Daily Record both give it front-page treatment, but the former has the killer paragraph.
In our view, it’s a serious mistake to treat prominent Labour activist Duncan Hothersall as someone sincerely concerned with the best interests of the Scottish people, differing only in how those interests are to be best served. His sole aim is to advance the fortunes of the Labour Party, and himself within it.
But that’s only an opinion, based on extensive personal experience of Hothersall issuing a long string of despicable lies, defamations, smears and general falsehoods in an attempt to discredit this site, chiefly among the more gullible elements of the Yes campaign. So let’s forget about Duncan’s toxic, cowardly excuse for a personality and examine his philosophy on its own merits, because it’s an exemplary case study of the wider ideology of Labour in Scotland’s opposition to independence.
Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.
We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.
Yesterday we ran a couple of features examining the sort of people the Yes campaign needs to convince if it’s to win the referendum in just over a year’s time, and how it might go about tackling that job. Today saw the release of a series of polls from Tory peer Lord Ashcroft that demonstrate just how big a challenge that’s going to present.
Because it’s not that the results show an electorate deeply committed to the Union (although they do suggest a large No majority, albeit from polling which was conducted as much as almost seven months ago), but because they illustrate just how little voters currently know about anything.
As we’ve already noted today, those who don’t currently support independence can be split into two groups: those who can be persuaded to support it, and those who can’t.
For the purposes of winning the referendum it’s important to be able to tell the difference between the two, so as to avoid wasting time trying to convert the non-convertible, and spend our time instead on those who can be persuaded to vote Yes.
Scotland on Sunday this week carries a piece interviewing No voters to find out why they’re currently intending to keep Scotland governed by Westminster (following on from a similar article about Yes supporters last week). It’s an interesting snapshot of both diehards and people who could yet be turned round.
Let’s take a look and see who we’re dealing with.
Norway is a country with a slightly smaller population than Scotland, with more difficult territory and climate. It discovered oil in its territorial waters at the same time as Scotland, and in broadly similar quantities. While Scotland’s standard of living is in freefall, like that of the rest of the UK, due to Tory austerity cuts brought about in large part by Labour’s spectacular failure to tackle inequality in “boom” times, this is how our neighbours across the North Sea are doing:
“Norway, which goes to the polls tomorrow, faces a strange problem: too much money. The Nordic country, an island of prosperity in ailing Europe, faces an embarrassment of riches as it tries to figure out how to spend its huge pile of oil money without damaging the economy in the long run.”
Better Together? The best of both worlds? Yeah, right.
This just in: Labour policy clarification on the bedroom tax, from the horse’s mouth.
(No, really. We’re not being satirical, although they might be.)
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
