This appears to be a genuine question from a YouGov poll going out to selected areas of the country today. We’ve had a couple of people confirm it to us who we have no reason to disbelieve. (It also asked this.)
The particular political arrangement it’s testing the waters of public opinion on there is fascist dictatorship. God help us all.
An alert reader got in touch with us this evening to tell us that they’d been clearing out an old hard drive and found an interesting web page they’d saved from several years ago. They asked if we’d like to see it.
“Sure”, we said. “Let’s have a look.”
It turned out that they’d had an exchange several years ago with Kezia Dugdale on her old (now deleted) blog, where she tended to be a bit more candid than she is now, and were so startled by an answer she’d given them that they’d felt the need to keep it.
The ultra-hardcore Unionist community – or the Yoons, as they’re better known – are in a pretty much permanent state of wild and terrified rage, but it’s been turned up to 11 for most of this year. Constantly proclaiming that the people of Scotland don’t want independence, for some reason they’re absolutely petrified of putting that to the test.
And it’s sending them to some dark places.
We followed with interest an exchange over the weekend between Times columnist Kenny Farquharson and the anti-Brexit QC Jolyon Maugham, regarding the difference between the UK government’s insistence that there won’t be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because of the UK leaving the EU, and its continued insistence that there WOULD have to be one between the rUK and an independent Scotland, despite the legal circumstances being indistinguishable.
Farquharson, who like much of the Scottish political commentariat clings doggedly to the implausible dream of a “federal” UK, was adamant that the rules would – and indeed that they should – be different for the two ostensibly identical situations, and his given reason was a deeply disturbing one.
Kenny, it seems, thinks Scottish nationalists should do a lot more murdering.
Several papers today carry a desperate story about education that’s sourced straight from a Scottish Labour press release, which pulls some figures out of thin air without providing any sources and appears to have left out at least one significant factor.
But that’s not the funny bit.
There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.
It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.
This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:
Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.
We were hugely excited earlier on today to receive news of a long-hoped-for team-up between two of our very favourite people on the internet: catastrophically thick Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen and popular lawsuit enthusiast JK Rowling.
What we hadn’t expected was a starring role.
Many readers spotted a particularly repellent article in the Daily Express this week, penned by its clueless and poisonous hack Siobhan McFadyen.
McFadyen, who rather uncharacteristically failed to insert any violent language into a headline about the First Minister, instead leapt eagerly onto an artificial furore around the actions of Gregg Brain, the Australian father battling his family’s deportation from the Highlands by the Home Office, at last week’s SNP conference.
(Their case is so outrageous that even the Daily Mail and David Coburn have joined the fight to have the family be allowed to stay.)
We got an email from Gregg Brain about how the story had come into being, and (with his permission) we thought you might like to see the exchange which took place between him and Siobhan McFadyen, with the purposes of illustrating how the press distorts, perverts and selectively omits quotes in order to mislead.
The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:
It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.
For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.
The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.
A new YouGov poll of Scottish voters was released today. It had no voting-intention figures, and concerned itself mostly with people’s assessment of the main Scottish and UK party leaders. The Labour-voters column was interesting to say the least.
That’s rather a lot of love for a Tory PM from people who voted Labour at the last UK election just over a year ago – more of Scottish Labour’s remaining voters found Theresa May likeable than dislikeable. But then things got even weirder.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
