First of all, congratulations to the Herald for only being eight days behind a retired website on this story. Unusually fast work, lads.
Now let’s deal with the spin.
One might almost imagine that once every Parliament, a drawing of lots is conducted at The Times’ offices in Scotland and the loser is obliged to write this column, on pain of a ceremonial debagging and a jolly good paddling with an old cricket bat from all the other chaps in the newsroom.
Perhaps the fear is playing tricks with Alex Massie’s memory.
We were sent something disturbing recently. It’s from a training course civil servants are being sent on by the Scottish Government.
As you can see, one of the sites that staff are directed to is something called The Trans Language Primer. We thought you should see some of its content.
Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.
The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.
This was overdue an update. Two extra rows now added.
(Click for full size image with legible dates. Landscape version here.)
This is getting properly embarrassing.
Because that starting gun must be red-hot by now.
We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.
So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.
I made the mistake of reading this on the BBC website today.
And I don’t think I’ve ever hated humanity more than I do right now.
We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.
The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.
So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.
I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.
My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.
Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.
Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.
Slacky The Holiday Boy is once again on his monthly two-week break, so it falls to us to try to amuse you on a Saturday morning with an image of some sort. Unfortunately very little funny is happening in Scottish politics, so all we’ve got is this.
Yes, the two most popular politics websites in Scotland at the moment are one that’s been retired for three months and one whose author is currently in prison. All hail that new media, eh?
Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.
Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.
It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
