In a post last month we referenced a ZX Spectrum computer game from 1984 called “Worse Things Happen At Sea”. Today as we watched the First Minister on the Andrew Marr Show, we were put in mind of another nautical-disaster-themed one from a great deal nearer to the end of the Speccy’s life.
It was grim viewing in every sense.
We’ve just been alerted to a new FOI response. It pretty much speaks for itself.
But it’s worth pondering the numbers.
Sometimes, despite everything, you just have to laugh.
No matter how black and rueful a laugh it might be.
The Scottish Parliament will today almost certainly pass a dangerously misleading and inaccurate motion to mark “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, and in doing so will join countless other institutions across the UK captured by trans ideology to the great detriment of women’s rights, freedom of speech and general sanity.
So we thought we’d mark it with a very short fact check.
Some years ago, a friend of mine was on a car journey along the motorway, with their brother driving. The night before there had been a storm and high winds. The bad weather had continued into the morning before easing, but the wind was still strong.
They were chatting in the car and as they continued to chat, my friend noticed that further along, a motorway stanchion that holds the lights had fallen across their path. It was blocking two of the three lanes, including the one that they were on. Despite that, they continued to chat as if it wasn’t there.
The obstacle drew nearer and nearer. Finally my friend said to his brother, “Aren’t you going to drive round that light?” His brother swerved and made it into the unblocked lane with feet to spare.
I asked my friend why they hadn’t swerved sooner. “Neither of us could believe it was there”, he said.
A reader alerted us to this. (You can skip the first minute.)
It’s a book currently being given to P1 children in Scotland, via the Scottish Book Trust. (We’re sure that by Christmas it’ll be getting read to them in class by drag queens.) And it’s something that people should probably be concerned about.
We’ve just made an executive decision that we’re going to keep sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government until we get a straight answer to at least one of them. We expect to be occupied for some time.
So here’s this week’s.
We have to admit the line below takes some chutzpah to even attempt. It’s a little bit like Harold Shipman refusing to admit to all the murders he committed on the grounds that revealing the victim/patients’ personal data would break the Hippocratic Oath.
We know, for an absolute and uncontested fact, by the Scottish Government’s own admission, that the First Minister has already committed the most serious breach of the Ministerial Code possible – lying to Parliament (section 1.3c). She lied about the date she first knew of the allegations against Salmond.
From the First Minister’s own personal written testimony, we know that the reason she lied to Parliament was that she had definitely also committed another breach of the Code, either by using Scottish Parliament premises for party matters (section 1.3i) or by failing to record government business discussed therein (sections 4.22, 4.23).
So it seems a bit late to be getting all bashful about the Code now.
Cosy Feet Pete’s done another tweet.
Nobody around here has any time for the Tories. But if you believe democracy should exist then governments should have oppositions and be subject to legitimate scrutiny.
The two motions the Scottish Government lost today (not just to the Tories but all the other opposition parties including the pro-independence Greens) were on providing evidence to the Salmond inquiry – ie they were being asked to do something the First Minister promised to do 19 months ago but which so far hasn’t been done – and on a public inquiry into the scandal of care home deaths, a genuinely serious issue.
These motions were the entirely proper business (and indeed duty) of a Parliamentary opposition. In the first instance they were acting on behalf of a cross-party, SNP-led committee which has repeatedly requested evidence it hasn’t been given, and in the second instance the SNP didn’t even oppose the motion (their MSPs abstained).
Neither of today’s motions were anything to do with independence or a referendum, just the normal everyday operation of government, so what Wishart is so indignantly demanding for his party is a rubber-stamping sham Parliament in which the SNP can do whatever it wants all the time without any meaningful scrutiny or challenge – an arrangement better known in communist China or the Third Reich.
(Ironically, it’s also exactly the sort of staggeringly arrogant entitlement you’d expect from the most stereotypical Eton Tory.)
We don’t know about you, folks, but that’s not what we signed up for.
It’s important not to understate the magnitude of the chance we’re missing.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
