We’re so far beyond mere “scraping the barrel” now.
Unhappy with polls based on asking the simple and clear question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”, and which have been stubbornly refusing to show any movement against independence, our dear old pals at Scotland In Union recently commissioned one of their own seeking to muddy the waters.
Their brainwave was to try to confuse respondents by tangling up the usual indyref responses (firmly and consistently set in people’s minds over the last seven years as “Yes” and “No”) with the responses associated with the EU referendum (“Remain” and “Leave”), in the hope that Scots – who of course are heavily in favour of Remain – would be fooled and/or brainwashed into saying something different.
And it very very slightly worked, right up to the point where it fell apart.
If we were to write an article every time Murdo Fraser said something moronic, we’d have to rename this site Wings Over Murdo Fraser, and drink an awful lot of Red Bull to be able to cover it all.
Stuff like this, for example, is almost too easy.
43% (actually 45.3% excluding Don’t Knows) is considerably more than Murdo Fraser has ever achieved in an election, either himself or as part of a party. His average over the seven elections he’s contested and lost since 1999 is just 30.1%, and until a blip in 2016 it had been falling lower and lower each time, as people have watched how he performed as an MSP and got less and less keen on the idea.
That’s still actually slightly more than the 28.6% his party secured in Scotland at the last election, though, in what was nevertheless generally regarded as an unusually impressive performance. Two years earlier they gathered just 14.9% of the votes cast.
Yet neither Fraser nor the Tories disappear for a generation every time Scotland tells them to go and get stuffed. Fraser keeps trousering an MSP’s fat salary despite two decades of unbroken and unequivocal personal rejection from the electorate, even as he demands that the independence movement gives up after losing ONE vote.
But in his defence, his leader’s not setting him much of an example.
Ever aware of its need to deliver informed enlightenment to the populace, the state broadcaster has recently put up a “BBC Brexit Jargon Buster” page on its website. We’re not sure it was meant to be quite this candid.
This piece ran in the Telegraph – a newspaper with no Scottish edition and almost no Scottish sales – on Friday. Click to enlarge.
Our favourite line is:
“Think of what the UK would be like without the vast wealth generated by the 44bn barrels of oil pumped from British territory over the last 40 years.”
(Curiously, this is a rather different line to the one Critchlow took during the indyref, when he was the Telegraph’s full-time business news editor penning a string of articles about how bankrupt an independent Scotland would be despite possessing an asset that’s now apparently big enough to prop up an economy 12 times Scotland’s size.)
It’s worth keeping in mind whenever Unionists tell us (a) how volatile and worthless and used-up oil is, (b) how much Scotland depends on the kind benevolence of the UK to survive, and (c) why we can’t have another referendum until years after Brexit.
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