Our old pal Euan McColm of Scotland on Sunday and ThinkScotland (also a stalwart of BBC/STV punditry, and formerly of the disgraced News Of The World) thinks you’re all just a figment of our imagination, readers.
If you’re not following, the implication (also made by James Mackenzie of “Better Nation”) is that we’re taking the money out of the fundraiser as soon as it comes in, then paying it back in ourselves as a new donation to artificially inflate the total.
(Although we’re not quite sure WHY we’d be doing that, as it would only result in us losing a sizeable chunk of the money we already had in commission every time we “recycled” it, and it would dissuade people from donating because they saw we’d already hit our target, and finally it’d mean that we then had to fund all the things we promised to do without actually having the money to pay for them.)
We’ve offered to show Mr McColm the books, on the condition that he writes an article for Scotland on Sunday or the Scotsman, openly and directly accusing us of what he implies in the tweets above. Let’s see how that goes.
Tags: fundraisers
Category
admin, idiots, media, wtf
From the Scotsman today:
“Without the offshore tax revenues, an independent Scotland’s public finances would be in a far worse state than are the UK’s. The better the argument that these revenues will carry on flowing, the more credible is the Yes campaign.”
Firstly, of course, the assertion fundamentally isn’t true. We know from official figures that an independent Scotland even WITHOUT oil would have a GVA of 99% of the UK average, and an independent Scotland wouldn’t have to follow UK spending plans, like blowing public cash on a vastly inflated military. But that’s not even the point.
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
A story from Reuters tonight:
“A majority of FTSE 100 chairmen oppose Scottish independence as they fear splitting up would be bad for British business and dilute the UK’s economic influence”
Ooft. How big is this majority of the chairmen of the 100 leading companies, then?
“The poll by executive search firm Korn Ferry found 65 percent of chairmen of 32 FTSE 100 companies said it would be bad for business if – “
Woah there! 65% of 32? Isn’t that, um, 21? That’s not really a “majority” of 100, is it? And while we’re here, how many of the chairmen of FTSE 100 companies have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum anyway? We have a strong suspicion that the effective sample in this survey might actually have been zero.
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Category
comment, media, uk politics
We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.
Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.
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Tags: arithmetic fail
Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
From today’s Telegraph.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
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Tags: cartoons
Category
culture, media, uk politics
To save time, just take everything we said last week and repeat.
Perhaps the most telling thing, though, about this week’s edition of what now appears to be the BBC’s official late-night No-campaign propaganda slot is that Iain Martin used to be the editor of the Scotsman. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
Someone just forwarded us the results of a survey by STV’s polling arm Scotpulse. It’s a “wordcloud” of the sort we have on this very site (it’s over on the right hand side and down a bit, marked “Tags”), where the more significant something is the bigger its name gets printed. It pretty much speaks for itself.
You’re the ones who put the word out there, readers. It’s working. Thank you.
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Category
admin, media, navel-gazing, scottish politics
We wouldn’t like to suggest Unionists are clutching at straws this week, but:
Number of words actually spoken by David Bowie about independence: 4
Number of words written about it so far by major news outlets: 3,916
To be honest we stopped counting after that.
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Category
comment, culture, media, scottish politics
So we just got this a few minutes ago (click pic to enlarge):
And now we’re really starting to think a licence-fee avoidance campaign is a good idea.
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Category
disturbing, media, scottish politics
Another scrupulously balanced panel from the state broadcaster.
The papers-review slot is turning into quite the little regular treat.
Category
idiots, media, scottish politics, uk politics, video
