A natural progression 215
Posted on
July 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘scottish politics’
Different kinds of news 123
Posted on
July 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last night we ran a piece about a story in last week’s Daily Record in which a Scottish Labour official was given free rein to make an extended political attack on the SNP in the guise of a “business student” from the University of the West of Scotland, without his Labour identity being revealed, on the flimsy basis of a petition about college cuts with a few hundred signatures.
As it happens, another UWS student also has a petition doing the rounds at the moment. But it got treated rather differently by the Scottish press.
How to turn £33 into £34 very slowly 33
Posted on
July 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert contributor Calum Ferguson tells us the first bookie to come out with odds for the 2016 Holyrood election is Ladbrokes. Fortune-making opportunities seem limited.
(Click pic to enlarge.)
An accidental omission 94
Posted on
July 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An alert reader brought our attention today to a Daily Record article that we’d missed on Friday, reporting how a Glasgow student had launched a petition bitterly attacking the Scottish Government over cuts to college places.
Despite having attracted only 500 signatures (and only 400 more in the following five days despite the Record helpfully linking to it), the petition was deemed newsworthy enough for a hefty polemic in which petition author Eunis Jassemi pulled no punches, repeatedly lashing the SNP in highly political terms. No counterquote was offered.
Mr Jassemi was described by the Record in the piece as a “business student” and a “former Hutcheson’s Grammar School pupil”, but we can only assume that they must have run out of room before they got to a rather more pertinent item on his CV.
Revised figures released 86
Posted on
July 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
David Cameron, 16 September 2014 and 8 May 2015 respectively:
You get how it works now, right?
One nation united 125
Posted on
July 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last night we highlighted the reaction from various right-wing columnists to the SNP’s torpedoing yesterday of Tory attempts to relax the laws on foxhunting in England and Wales. Today the same commentariat has turned its rage to thoughts of revenge, in the form of “English votes for English laws”.
And we’re confused, because we don’t know what this “England” they speak of is.
What a champion of Scotland looks like 204
Posted on
July 14, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Friendly help for the Daily Mail 119
Posted on
July 14, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As part of their tireless campaign against abuse and threats on the internet, the Mail’s ever-alert reporters will doubtless be wanting to run a major piece on the deputy leader of UKIP calling today on a widely-read website for Nicola Sturgeon to be killed.
No need to thank us for the tip-off, guys. All part of the service.
Fox Force 56 248
Posted on
July 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s little to gladden the heart of a left-wing Scot like a Tory squealing in outrage that he won’t be allowed to torture woodland creatures to death for “sport” any more.
So this site is thrilled by the announcement from the SNP that they will, after much speculation in the media, vote against (and therefore likely condemn to defeat) the UK government’s plans to relax England’s fox-hunting ban to a point at which it would be de facto repealed entirely.
And not just because foxes are a lot cuter than Tories.
A curious discrepancy 81
Posted on
July 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Scottish Daily Mail today leads with a screaming banner headline announcing in its trademark style that, according to a poll it commissioned with Survation, Scots are massively opposed to any income tax rises when Holyrood eventually gets power over the rates under the new Scotland Bill.
And the reason that’s weird is that we commissioned a poll on the very same thing just days before, and got a dramatically different answer.
There goes another one 116
Posted on
July 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Yesterday we listed some of the nastier items from George Osborne’s horrifying 2015 budget that Labour had said they wouldn’t be opposing, including the public-sector payrise freeze, the reduction in the benefit cap and the slashing of child tax credit for families with more than two children.
On a BBC hustings debate today, Yvette Cooper extended the list.
Nature versus nurture 249
Posted on
July 10, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Because our recent Panelbase poll shared a sample with one for the Sunday Times, there was an unasked-for bonus in the data. The ST had asked Panelbase to divide the 1002 Scottish residents into those born in Scotland, those born in England and those born elsewhere (including the rest of the UK).
The paper has a slightly unsavoury track record for doing so, and it did it this time for the sake of running a deeply statistically-iffy question aiming to prove that a lot of Yes voters were anti-English, but we’ll get to that in another article.
What that meant was that we were able to cross-reference the “ethnicity” data against all of our questions, and that resulted in a couple of interesting findings.
