Another scrupulously balanced panel from the state broadcaster.
The papers-review slot is turning into quite the little regular treat.
Yesterday, a wealthy American man who as far as we know won’t have a vote in the referendum expressed a personal opinion about independence which made the front page of half of Scotland and Britain’s newspapers, was trumpeted all over the TV and radio, and got “Better Together” very excited.
This morning some idiot based in Luxembourg honked about it on BBC Breakfast news, throwing in his own clueless and ill-informed (and of course, unchallenged) view. We’re having some difficulty working out why we’re supposed to care about either man’s position, or why they were given lots of free airtime to espouse them.
It takes some doing to make even BBC News presenters look a little uncomfortable at the sheer depth of your ignorance when it comes to Scottish independence, so we probably ought to offer some sort of commendation to this guy:
Poor Anas Sarwar. He just can’t get anything right.
Doing his best to join in with the Daily Mail’s month-long witch-hunt, Labour’s “deputy” leader in Scotland leaps on an abusive and disturbingly racist-looking comment aimed at him. It’s nasty all right. It could well qualify as “hate”. But who’s it from?
Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, just discovered:
God DAMN it! Who knew we were just the unwitting dupes of the Belgians all along?
…about the shameful, despicable sectarian comments by TV celebrity and occasional politician George Galloway in an Edinburgh Evening News article today, about how he’s been refused permission by West Lothian Council to put on his anti-independence “Just Say Naw” roadshow at a municipal venue in Livingston.
But then we kept reading, because we don’t like to go off half-cocked without getting the full story, and were richly rewarded for our effort by a magnificently deadpan line from the paper’s reporter. We’ve unsubtly bolded it for you below.
…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.
“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)
So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.
The Independent is the most English newspaper in Britain. Alone among the nationals, it has neither a Scottish edition nor even a Scottish news section. And for the vast majority of the time, it acts as though Scotland simply doesn’t exist at all. (Or, perhaps, as if Scotland was already independent and therefore none of its business.)
So it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that on the rare occasions it dares venture north of Luton, it invariably makes a gigantic ham-fisted hash of it.
Here’s the Secretary Of State For Portsmouth, legendary bruiser Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael, in this morning’s Herald on the subject of the dastardly SNP Scottish Government intimidating businesses out of speaking up for the Union:
A random sample from the front page of our “PressReader” newspaper app, there, covering just a single month (March 2013). Heaven help us all if the media suddenly breaks free of these draconian constraints and tells us what it REALLY thinks.
This morning we’ve been double- and triple-checking our story from last night, because we were so sure we must have missed something. Even given the low esteem in which we hold the integrity of the hapless “Better Together” campaign, we felt that they surely couldn’t have made such an idiotic and fundamental error, and that instead we must have misinterpreted a word or a sentence somewhere along the way.
But no. We were wrong in that assumption. They really ARE that dim.
We saw this graphic on the “Better Together” website yesterday, but we dismissed it as uninteresting even by their playground-propaganda standards, amounting as it does to nothing more than some startlingly feeble carping along the lines of “These are their forecasts, but we’ve made different forecasts so theirs must be wrong!”
But an alert reader observed that it was MUCH stupider than that. Can you spot why?
One of Labour’s key allies in Scotland is solicitor Mike Dailly of the Govan Law Centre. Best known for his attempts to force the Scottish Government to subsidise the bedroom tax by cutting services elsewhere, he’s a venomously anti-SNP figure who rarely passes up the chance for a bit of Nat-bashing.
(It would, we’re sure, be overly cynical to suggest that Mr Dailly wants the bedroom tax propped up because if it was abolished he’d suddenly be out of the public eye.)
Today he’s published a blog angrily contesting the claim made in yesterday’s White Paper that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
We thought we’d take a look.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
