As we write there’s a protest going on outside the Scottish Parliament regarding the privatisation of ferry services to the Western Isles. It was formally announced almost three hours ago that there definitely wasn’t going to be any privatisation and that the service would remain in public hands, but the protest still went ahead.
The people conducting the protest, who’ve got the exact thing they wanted, are now doing their level best to lose it again. Welcome to Scottish politics.
In amongst a torrent of pretty mad analysis of the election result at the weekend, we noticed the most insane reason yet suggested for the loss of the SNP’s majority:
The co-founder of a much-lauded but little-read pro-independence website asserted that the SNP were cruising to victory until the Nats got the backing of the Scottish Sun and Nicola Sturgeon was pictured posing with the front cover endorsing her party.
The whole litany of gaping flaws in that argument is something the Yes movement has needed to talk about for some considerable time now. So let’s bite the bullet and do it.
We were having a quiet night in, readers. (Living in a cul-de-sac, it’s quite peaceful here in the evenings, unless we’re hosting a soirée.) We’d just made ourselves a late snack of a tasty baguette – preceded by a small apéritif, and a few canapés serving as hors d’oeuvre – as the au pair is on holiday in Paris this week with the chauffeur, taking in some haute couture.
As we relaxed on the chaise-longue, pondering an indulgent dessert of a chocolate eclair or some crème brûlée, we glanced at Twitter, in the hope of being amused by a few bon mots in the milieu of the internet. Sadly, the reality was a cliché.
Dismayingly, this magnificent piece of virtuoso television interviewing from last night’s Scotland Tonight doesn’t appear to have been recorded in full splendid isolation for posterity anywhere, so it would be a grave failure of duty on our part not to preserve it for those viewers unfortunate enough to have been otherwise engaged.
We had a little Twitter run-in last night with former Scottish Labour deputy leader and current unemployed halfwit Anas Sarwar, when he reported us to Police Scotland for making a joke about bank holiday mail deliveries, “people in England” and “especially” Scottish ones – which of course includes this site’s own editor, that being the gag.
We’d almost forgotten he existed. But the incident brought something back to mind.
To be fair to Mr Sarwar, he was at least partly right.
Here’s a column from Kenny Farquharson in today’s tablet edition of the Times, which hasn’t made it onto the website. We don’t know if it’s in the print version.
To mark the day when Scotland would have become independent had it voted Yes in 2014, the Scottish Conservatives have hired someone who sells dog food (not very successfully) for a living to produce a 37-page dossier about how absolutely dreadful Scotland is and how it would be the most bankrupt country in Europe – poorer than Greece, poorer than Latvia and poorer than Cyprus.
It wasn’t supposed to be released publicly until tomorrow, so that all the papers could splurge their loads on it, but someone found a copy that had been left on a bus and sent it to us. It’s incredibly dull, but if you really want to read it, it’s here.
Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.
But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:
Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Your Party. A dirty old man and a rabid death cultist. Old Jeremy is all out of friends. They are…” Mar 25, 14:14
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Just flexing your lefty muscles with an afternoon antisemitic black Live matter rant. Isn’t it time you kissed the ground…” Mar 25, 14:11
Breastplate on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Insider, you’ve got me. I don’t understand the question or the answer, could you tell me please, pretty please, with…” Mar 25, 14:10
Insider on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Breastplate @12:18 No amount of bluster and attempted diversions on your part can disguise your comprehension problems or the fact…” Mar 25, 13:48
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Endlessly recounting Scotland’s ancient constitutional past will not persuade those unpersuaded Scots who support the Union to change their minds.…” Mar 25, 13:37
Captain Caveman on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: ““Are you dumb? Yer literally posting on an Independence blog” Heh!! Just when you think the irony-o-meter can’t be overloaded,…” Mar 25, 13:21
Dan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Civic nationalism was never going to work in Scotland, because Hondas rust like fuck at the best of times; And…” Mar 25, 12:55
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I’m going to keep reminding you yoons what site yer actually posting on. Not only is it rude but it’s…” Mar 25, 12:32
Dan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Damn it! Pity we’ve got the wrong sort of leccy up here… “The Grid cannae cope”… But Scotland is generating…” Mar 25, 12:27
Breastplate on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Insider, I think there’s a bit of projection on your part, as you clearly have no idea what I’m talking…” Mar 25, 12:18
Confused on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “blowing up ambulances is wrong – wherever it happens … https://archive.ph/M0H5A (who does this a LOT? and who started it?)…” Mar 25, 12:14
Confused on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “assimilation? integration?? civic nationalism? https://x.com/RMXnews/status/2036058154530676736 – how’s that working out? and how can it work with : people who actively…” Mar 25, 12:12
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Are you dumb? Yer literally posting on an Independence blog that not only posted thousands of articles debunking yoons pish…” Mar 25, 11:56
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Why do scottish council or the rest of Britain for that matter pay Council tax, The council tax follows your…” Mar 25, 11:36
Insider on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Breastplate…. You appear to have SERIOUS comprehension problems ! Chas’s comment was.. “nobody ever says who will form an honest,…” Mar 25, 11:23
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Why not change the subject indeed, Why does Scotland pay The Standard Great Britain annual income tax, And Scotland pay…” Mar 25, 11:17
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “North code, I know of many other issues and topics that relate to the people in general, however there is…” Mar 25, 11:11
Breastplate on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Chas, I understand that you find the concept of independence difficult so let’s come at it from another angle. If…” Mar 25, 10:49
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “There are many ways to suck the finances out of Scotlands people. False Elections, Different added on income tax’s, Mineral…” Mar 25, 10:35
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Oh, do shut up, you Inglis bore. Why are you even posting your Anglo-drivel here? The only comments I’ve ever…” Mar 25, 10:23
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “What if our roles were reversed and it were England governed entirely by Scotland and the Scots and not the…” Mar 25, 10:18
Chas on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “The first sensible comment from you that I have ever seen. Well done.” Mar 25, 10:00
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “A word of advice, and I’m sorry to have to say this, James Che, but even I, a staunch supporter…” Mar 25, 09:30
Chas on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I worry about the mental health of the nutters who post the same tripe day, after day, after day on…” Mar 25, 09:15
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Scottish people pay the standard income tax as the rest of Great Britain, however they also have added on Scottish…” Mar 25, 09:13
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Scotland is not in the parliament of Great Britain. Scotland is not in the parliament of the United kingdom. Only…” Mar 25, 09:01
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Why vote? To continue Colonialism, to hold and de- value democracy in Scotland. These are not actually Scottish elections.” Mar 25, 08:40
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Scotland is not bound to the 1707 parliament of Great Britain, Scotland is not bound to the united kingdom parliament…” Mar 25, 08:35
James Che on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “The pretend Scottish parliament and its false Scottish elections with Englands registered political parties are irrelevant to people in Scotland,…” Mar 25, 08:23
