We can’t remember if anyone mentioned this last week when we were talking about the Scotland Office’s bizarre Buzzfeed escapades, so we’ll just put it up here now.
There’s something not quite right about that picture and the words underneath it, isn’t there, readers? Have you spotted it yet?
We were going to take the night off until we read this drivel. Gah.
And if we’re being honest, we were just too pleased with the pun.
Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.
From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:
So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?
As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.
It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.
As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.
And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.
Remember, kids – nationalism is bad. Stay away from the evil nationalists, or they might steal your Union Jack flag, Union Jack t-shirt or Royal Standard.
The only number that can be divided to end up with nothing is zero.
Every time today that we’ve re-watched Johann Lamont’s multi-vehicular pile-up of an interview on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, we’ve seen something new in it that we missed previously and which makes us pull this face:
So (hngh) we’re going to have to get these down for posterity.
While we wait for the full detail of what look like being even more watered-down and insipid “Devo Lite” proposals from Labour than we were expecting, we suppose we might as well spend a minute on last night’s big “Better Together” announcement that Eddie Izzard was going to hold a benefit gig for the No campaign, putting the Union on a par with starving Ethiopians and earthquake victims.
Einstein is claimed to have said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (and readers hopefully already know our views on Quote Nazis), so we found a line attributed to Izzard in the press release particularly striking.
We’re given to believe that this is real, not a spoof.
Just when we thought our opinion of them couldn’t possibly sink any lower.
Here’s the Scottish Conservatives deputy leader Jackson Carlaw, fuming on the BBC website yesterday about the £1.3m cost of producing and distributing the Scottish Government’s independence white paper:
So, that’s pretty clear. Even though they’ve spent much of the last two years demanding the Scottish Government answer literally hundreds of questions about independence, the Tories don’t believe that it’s worth spending slightly less than 25p per Scot to actually give the people those answers.
But wait – what’s this coming over the hill? Is it a monster?
Earlier today we may have given some readers the impression that Gordon Brown’s six-point proposals for the constitutional future of Scotland within the UK were weak, vague and essentially meaningless waffle.
However, now that we’ve seen the recommendations (in a report rather egotistically entitled “Campbell II”) also produced today by Sir Menzies Campbell of the Liberal Democrats, we’ve realised that by comparison Mr Brown has delivered a masterwork of comprehensive, considered and well-thought-out detail.
Get a load – and we do mean a load – of this, readers.
It was good to see our old pal, prolific Labour and “Better Together” activist Duncan Hothersall, welcoming the chance for everyone to learn from mistakes yesterday with regard to giving out people’s personal information on the internet.
Of course, Roseanna Cunningham only revealed contact info that was already in the public domain and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, and which had been widely sent out by the person concerned in a spray of unsolicited begging letters. It’d be much worse to give out contact information that was previously unknown and was only sent to one person in a private email, right?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
