Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.
We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, comment, investigation, media, scottish politics
(Help keep this vital news outlet broadcasting here.)
Tags: dateline
Category
scottish politics, video
The website of the Dumfries & Galloway Conservative Party yesterday:
Perhaps they read the press coverage of the Salmond-Darling debate later on.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, scottish politics
The key exchange on currency from last night’s debate:
At the end of the clip, a flustered Darling finally blurts out what the No camp have been trying not to admit for the entire campaign: “Of course we could use the pound”.
Unionists and journalists are now frantically spinning that they’d never denied such a thing. But we know that’s not true, and nobody got left with more egg on their face than Mr Darling’s supposed superior, Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, debunks, scottish politics, video
Things you’ll never hear a Scottish interviewer say.
Category
comment, scottish politics, video
Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.
He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: vortex
Category
comment, investigation, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve been so busy with the Wee Blue Book for the past week or so that we only just got round to listening to last Tuesday’s interview with Alistair Darling on Good Morning Scotland in time, before it vanished from the iPlayer. The former Chancellor gets a quite uncomfortable ride from presenter Gary Robertson, and flaps angrily for much of the ten-and-a-half minutes trying to turn every question into one on currency.
Mr Darling also makes some startlingly and empirically false statements throughout the interview, and we thought it’d be worth noting a few of them and seeing if they crop up on tonight’s BBC1 debate with the First Minister.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: captain darlingdebatesflat-out lies
Category
audio, comment, debunks, scottish politics
There’s some interesting footage circulating today of a referendum debate for women that took place last week. Many people have focused on No-campaign representative Cat Headley admitting that a “Better Together” leaflet made some highly misleading claims about an independent Scotland’s ranking among the world’s wealthiest countries, but we covered that back in May so we won’t go over it again.
The bit of the meeting that caught our eye is at 1m 36 in the clip above.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: flat-out liesliars
Category
comment, scottish politics, transcripts, video
Stand by, readers. We’re about to post some porn for stat nerds.
Yeah, you like that, don’t you? What’s a bit less sexy, though, is what the table above means for the “safety and security” of the UK, and the cost of your mortgage.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, debunks, scottish politics
