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When there’s no more to be said 112

Posted on April 26, 2014 by

We suppose we have to credit “Better Together” with SOME intelligence after all. It seems they’ve finally and belatedly learned that Tory ministers coming up and lecturing Scotland is a counter-productive business, so this week they sent Gordon Brown in to do Iain Duncan Smith’s dirty work for him, by issuing dire warnings about the cost of welfare in an independent Scotland using figures helpfully fed to him by IDS’s Department for Work and Pensions.

brownspeech5

But the UK government also released, with rather less fanfare, some other figures about pensions this week that didn’t reflect quite as well on the Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister.

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Category analysis, comment, scottish politics

One broken promise too many 76

Posted on April 26, 2014 by

hamishlabour

(See also here.)

Tags:
Category pictures, scottish politics

The weekenders 170

Posted on April 25, 2014 by

If you’re a politician in Scotland and you want to do something with the smallest possible amount of scrutiny, Friday is the day you choose. Neither of the major nightly current-affairs shows have Friday editions (we’re actually not entirely sure why that is), so unless you make a REAL mess of something you can be sure the news agenda will have moved on by the time Monday rolls around.

milibot11

We suspect that the CBI’s mind-boggling decision to abandon its position of being part of the official No campaign falls firmly into that category and will be pretty thoroughly chewed over in the next couple of days (despite them doing their very best to bury it by announcing it at six o’clock on a Friday evening), so we’re going to stick to our original plan and talk about Ed Miliband instead.

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Category analysis, scottish politics

A catastrophe for Africa 368

Posted on April 25, 2014 by

This clip comes from yesterday’s “Good Morning Scotland”, around 2h 35m in.

soundwave2

It features Professor Paul Collier, who is apparently the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and therefore an obvious choice for the BBC as a go-to guy on the subject of Scottish politics.

We think you’ll find it a stimulating and thought-provoking opinion.

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Category audio, comment, scottish politics, world, wtf

A slight change of position 59

Posted on April 25, 2014 by

We read yesterday how Labour and the Tories have both, in rather different ways, been expressing their concern about the demographic timebomb that will affect Scotland unless it can attract a major increase in immigration.

“An independent Scotland would need almost one million immigrants by the middle of the century to boost the workforce and defuse its pensions time bomb, [Labour shadow pensions spokesman Gregg McClymont] has warned.”

And just a few months earlier:

“Economists believe the population needs to grow by 24,000 people a year just to keep pace with European economies. Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: ‘A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base. That is absolutely essential for the economy.”

So we’d imagine that’s always been the Labour and Tory policy, right?

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Category analysis, scottish politics

The bulldog whistle 328

Posted on April 24, 2014 by

Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.

Any similarity to Labour and BNP rhetoric is entirely actual.

The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.

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Category analysis, comment, scottish politics

Bring me sunshine 112

Posted on April 24, 2014 by

Remember how the No campaign was definitely going to be much more positive from now on, pushing a feelgood “sunshine strategy” to persuade Scots that the UK was the best of both worlds?

gethurt

Let’s see how that’s going, shall we?

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Category analysis, apocalypse, comment, scottish politics

The independence debate at a glance 65

Posted on April 24, 2014 by

Three years summed up in two tweets:

As a rule, only one of these stories would get printed.

(We’re kidding, of course. Normally the media isn’t nearly that balanced.)

Category pictures, scottish politics

Actually lost for words 166

Posted on April 24, 2014 by

"That's MY job!"

Tomorrow: “‘Eat that pie and you’ll get fat’, says Pickles”.

Category comment, scottish politics

One step closer 179

Posted on April 23, 2014 by

Earlier this week we did a little poking and prodding of the Scotsman’s last ICM poll, and now the full data tables are in for the latest one, so to while away an hour before tea we figured we may as well do a bit of comparing and see how things had changed.

miley

Wait! Come back! There’ll be Miley Cyrus at the end!

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Category analysis, music, psephology, scottish politics, stats, video

Untied with Labour 106

Posted on April 23, 2014 by

We’ve just endured Gordon Brown’s 45-minute “old man shouting out a series of random unconnected facts from Wikipedia” speech at Glasgow University. (You should be able to find it later on the iPlayer under the programme title “Briefings”, if you really want to.) It doesn’t bear a lot of analysis, being just the same old cobblers you’ve heard a thousand times before, but delivered in a more rambling manner.

brownspeech4

There was one vaguely interesting thing about the event, though.

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Category analysis, comment, scottish politics

A nice easy one 117

Posted on April 23, 2014 by

Here’s the Scottish Labour finance spokesman Iain Gray on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, discussing Gordon Brown’s speech in Glasgow on pensions because Mr Brown himself refused to answer any questions about it.

As ever with Mr Gray, he packs a lot of entertainment into a short space of time.

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Category analysis, reference, scottish politics, stats, world

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