We might have to transcribe the whole thing, because it’s remarkable.
But for now here’s just a brief flavour of Willie Rennie on the subject of an independent Scotland’s membership of NATO, from last night’s Newsnight Scotland (from 5m 30s).
Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.
The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.
We were very proud of a terrific performance from Scotland at Wembley last night, in a highly entertaining friendly the national side was unlucky to lose due to a couple of lapses in concentration at set pieces. We also greatly enjoyed the tremendous atmosphere created by both sets of fans, which we read about in the Daily Mail:
And also in the Scottish Daily Mail:
Wait, what?
Readers who haven’t recently suffered a blow to the head will probably recall that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was quoted in the Scotsman last week (in a story which WAS considered worthy of coverage), bitterly complaining that the Yes campaign had used the phrase “best of both worlds”, which for some reason he appeared to believe was his exclusive possession.
The fine gentleman above was pictured on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street on Saturday. He also appears to be toting some borrowed property. Can you spot it?
Sweet mercy. We’ve been pretty scathing about the Scottish media over the last few days, but we had no idea that our jibes about the Scotsman in particular now being a spoof site were so literally true.
The image above comes from the Scotsman’s editorial leader accompanying its ridiculous Nate Silver decoy story this morning. We’ve highlighted a line for you.
In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”
Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?
We had a listen to Radio Scotland this morning again. We only caught the end of Good Morning Scotland, but we were still in time to catch them cramming in a piece on today’s comedy Scotsman headline about American psephologist Nate Silver and his vague, generalised comments about polling.
With an absolutely straight face (so far as you can tell on radio, anyway), the GMS presenter asked Silver for his view on “how well the media handles statistics”, while carefully steering the discussion in such a way that neither Silver nor fellow live guest Professor John Curtice had any opportunity to refer to the Panelbase poll commissioned by this site and published last week.
(We have no idea if either of them would have had any desire to, but the presenter’s questions carefully closed off any avenues which might have offered the chance.)
(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)
We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:
It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”
There’s one last bit of data from our poll that we haven’t revealed the results of yet. That’s because, unlike the rest of the survey, this one absolutely WAS a leading question. We asked it partly to satirise the ridiculously slanted nature of those used in some “Better Together” polls, such as this one, but also to make a more serious point.
If you’re looking forward to Wednesday’s game at Wembley, this one’s for you.
The Scottish media has adopted a uniform silence over the results of last week’s Panelbase poll. We can simply accept that, or we can stand up and challenge it.
The BBC is funded by a compulsory tax, enforced by law. You pay for it to serve you. If you think it’s been abdicating its duty, why not ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” (presented by stand-in Louise Smith) this morning from 8.50am – lines actually open at 8am – and let them know how you feel about it?
By phone: 0500 92 95 00
By text: 80295
By email: callkaye@bbc.co.uk
Please be polite. If you call but don’t get on, or your text or email isn’t used, please tell us in the comments section below. (In the case of text or email, include a copy.)
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
