Annie Wells and Brian Whittle are two new Conservative MSPs. Look how happy and excited they are today at Labour winning a council by-election from the SNP.
The SNP candidate actually won comfortably on first-preference votes, but was edged out at the sixth count under the Single Transferable Vote system when 78% of Tory voters gave their second preference to Labour (whose own vote fell 7%).
We’re trying to think of a good reason why they’re still two separate parties, but to be honest with you, readers, we’re coming up short.
Category
comment, scottish politics, wtf
No, we’re not referring to the Spectator’s awful reheated whine from super-Unionist composer Sir James Macmillan, Knight Commander Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire, in which he takes the audacious step of accusing some OTHER artistes of cravenly kowtowing to the establishment.
(A complaint he’s been levelling for several years in any publication that’ll listen, and which today’s piece hasn’t bothered to update with any post-2014 examples.)
We’re actually talking about this:
Because this one’s even older.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, debunks, history, media, scottish politics
We thought yesterday’s Herald story – about a Scottish Government initiative designed to increase visitor numbers to island communities “backfiring” when it, er, increased visitor numbers to island communities – would be hard to top for this month’s SNP BAD Award, but when the paper grudgingly amended it a few hours later it seemed we’d have to look for a new contender.
Luckily we didn’t have long to wait.
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Category
comment, history, scottish politics
This morning’s SNP BAD piece in the Herald has undergone a slight change in tone since we wrote about it.
We’ll just assume that a small pang of conscience overcame someone.
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Tags: and finally
Category
media, scottish politics
There’s a story in today’s Herald about yet another SNP disaster:
Backfires? What, the fares have gone UP?
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Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, debunks, media, scottish politics
An alert reader spotted this today:
How times have changed, eh, readers?
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Tags: hypocrisy
Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics
God knows, readers, there’s almost nothing we want to write about less than either David Torrance or the Scottish Six. Just to restate our own position for the record, we couldn’t care less either way about a dedicated teatime Scottish news programme on BBC Scotland – not because it’s a bad idea but because we have no confidence that in reality it’d end up any better than the embarrassment that is Reporting Scotland, far and away the regional station’s worst current-affairs broadcast.
(Certainly now that Scotland 2016’s had the chop.)
Nevertheless, the former’s article about the latter in today’s Herald is one of the most abysmally disingenuous and badly-argued things we’ve seen in the Scottish media for quite some time, and in the absence of any more diverting news in what now seems to have reasserted itself as the traditional summer slow season, we might as well take a methodical look at it.
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Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
Straight from a Scottish Labour activist, here’s a little something that’s worth keeping in mind every day of the next decade (or more) of brutal Tory governments imposing policies rejected by the vast majority of Scots.
Category
comment, scottish politics
Have you ever wondered how you try to poison and shut down a debate and a political environment that you fear you’ve found yourself on the losing side of, readers? Well, it’s funny you should ask, because as it happens we’ve got a visiting professor – an expert authority on the subject – with us today to give us a demonstration.
Make sure you’ve got your pens and notepads ready. He’s got a very busy schedule and we can’t afford to have him here for long.
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Tags: phantoms
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
There’s been a statistic released in Scotland, so obviously there’s a crisis.
Anarchy on the streets can only be moments away.
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Category
debunks, media, missing context, scottish politics
