This is an intriguing and engrossing extended chat between Christopher Silver and Iain Macwhirter for what will hopefully become a regular series by the excellent Phantom Power Films, creators of Altered States and lots more:
It’s well worth whiling away a little bit of your afternoon on.
Chris Cairns is on holiday. Yes, again.
If there’s one thing the Scottish Conservatives love to do, it’s lecture the SNP about vetting its candidates. Here’s Ruth Davidson on Michelle Thomson, for example:
And it’s not just her.
Because this just happened:
And that’s about as close to a guarantee as you’ll get, readers.
We haven’t seen this published anywhere else, so we may as well do it. We dropped a brief line to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust a few days ago querying their award of a £50,000 grant to disgraced lying MP Alistair Carmichael, specifically in the context of the fact that their own website expressly excludes grants for “legal fees”.
Below is their response, which we received today.
This is a Scotsman front page from nine months ago:
We don’t think many people would disagree with that.
In the end, we decided comment on this was superfluous.
Michael McMahon, the Scottish Labour candidate for Uddingston & Bellshill, has been MSP for the seat (or its previous equivalent) since 1999.
Kezia Dugdale gave an interview to Good Morning Scotland earlier today that viewed from above would probably look rather like the runway at Baghdad Airport in 1991.
If we tried to pick out all the individual bomb craters in one post, readers’ eyes would glaze over long before the end. So we’re going to have to do it in bits.
When we ran this story on Monday, some of the press got rather upset with us. Even though we’d linked to the full data tables published on the ComRes site, Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden, for example, huffily tweeted a link to a cropped table suggesting that the real sample size was higher.
And as it turned out, it was.
STV’s Bernard Ponsonby asks Kezia Dugdale about the possibility of a future second referendum should the Scottish electorate express a clear democratic wish for one:
(Not taken out of context. To see the full clip, go to around 1h 43m here.)
From the STV debate, an alert reader spots the picture that sums up Scottish Labour.
Alert readers will have noticed that the Conservatives and most of the right-wing press have recently embarked on a hyperbolic campaign against the Scottish Government’s “named person” child-protection legislation. The latest assault is in today’s Daily Mail:
The shriekingly furious lead article thunders in outrage that “nearly two thirds of Scots have condemned the SNP’s state guardian scheme as an ‘unacceptable intrusion’ into family life”, which sounds like a pretty damning verdict.
It’s not until you look a little deeper that it all falls to pieces.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
