Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.
But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.
We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.
But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.
It’s a sleepy Wednesday in July, so let’s celebrate some proud British culture!
We were intrigued to hear Labour activist Duncan Hothersall tell radio listeners this morning that his party’s opposition to independence was rooted in “Labour values”, and most specifically by his assertion that “nationalism and socialism are opposites”.
So we thought we’d take a look back at our last Panelbase opinion poll, which we conducted in February, and see what the values of Unionists were.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this.
Because we’ve been telling you it was coming for half a decade.
We haven’t said much about the huge furore whipped up by the Guardian in recent days around spurious allegations of racism/online abuse by supporters of Scottish independence, made first by Sadiq Khan and then by a deranged “Better Together” activist who also thinks all vegans are racist (or something).
Partly that’s because we covered the initial speech by Khan and the fallout from it pretty extensively, and partly because we didn’t want to feed the Guardian’s clickbait.
However, when the activist who was allegedly “hounded off Twitter” in fear for her life – fear caused by supposed comments that nobody has actually seen – miraculously recovered her bravery less than a week later (coincidentally just in time for the launch of her book), we thought it was probably time someone started keeping some records.
What does racism and separatism actually look like? How would we know it if we saw it? What are its defining characteristics? Who are its advocates?
Let’s see if we can find out.
No voters, Leave voters and Labour/Tory voters are more racist than Yes, Remain, Lib Dem and SNP voters. Who could ever have guessed?
The former groups all agreed that there was a problem with too much immigration in Scotland. The latter groups all disagreed. It’s that stark, folks.
From these small beginnings shall our ultimate victory come.
The votes for “God Save The Queen” being driven by Tories, English-born residents and supporters of a particular football club probably won’t come as the biggest shock in the world to anyone.
(Alert viewers will of course have noticed that due to MI5 INTERFERENCE in the poll, there were actually two votes for Hoots Mon, which have been suspiciously rounded down to one. We are conducting an investigation, by which we mean brutal purge.)
Just for fun.
(The combined figure for all football fans, incidentally, is Yes 52% No 48%.)
It’s morning in America, readers.
Judge Dredd: Origins was published in 2007, although in fact the basic story of how Bad Bob Booth became the last President of the USA and what he did next was established right back at the 1970s beginnings of Dredd’s parent comic 2000AD.
We actually have a theory that it’s all the Lib Dems’ fault.
We weren’t going to dignify the utterly absurd media stushie over a tweet by Glasgow MSP John Mason yesterday with any coverage because it was too cretinous to even bear thinking about, but this from today’s Daily Record was just too good.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
