The difference a day makes 96
Posted on
March 03, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Scotland on Sunday yesterday:
The Scotsman 24 hours later:
Rinse, lather and repeat for the next six months.
Archive for the ‘scottish politics’
The Eton Rifling 177
Posted on
March 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Heavens above. We thought that being reduced to sending out chain letters might have been some sort of rogue effort, but it seems “Better Together” really is as desperate for cash as it’s appeared to be in recent months, with barely a week going by that we don’t get an email from Alistair Darling, chatting about some aspect of the debate before suddenly going “SO WE NEED MONEY! MONEY! SEND MONEY NOW!”
But the piece above appearing in this week’s Sunday Times (where we initially missed it because it was in the “UK News” rather than the “Scottish News” section) was backed up by another piece of extraordinary panhandlery.
The case as it is 72
Posted on
March 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
If you missed it live, here’s the audio recording of the debate held at the Volunteer Rooms in Irvine on Friday. (The event wasn’t video-recorded, despite Clan Destiny Films having a high-quality camera team there, because the Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, Brian Donohoe, refused to give his permission.)
Click the image for the two-hour MP3 file.
The meanings of life 81
Posted on
March 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This week’s edition of the Sunday Herald is a “referendum special” marking 200 days of the campaign to go (although actually it doesn’t have an awful lot more referendum coverage than a normal issue).
There are lots of things worth reading – as ever, we recommend spending a modest 69p for a digital copy via PressDisplay – but what really caught our eye were the two interviews with the heads of the Yes and No camps, Blairs Jenkins and McDougall.
Pay your money, take your choice 83
Posted on
March 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A tale of two cities 65
Posted on
March 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Yes Scotland campaigning today in Edinburgh:
Let’s throw a surprise party 125
Posted on
March 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail on Wall Street Journal Live yesterday.
“I would be very surprised if at the end of the day the Scots will vote for independence. It’s a fantasy, it’s a romantic fantasy, it’s fuelled by fantasy, by resentment, by all sorts of issues.”
Shall we take five minutes out from hating the English and give her a surprise?
A quirk of fate 58
Posted on
March 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The diagram below comes from an interesting feature in The Chemical Engineer Today, pointed out to us by an alert reader and which has a few flaws but is still well worth a browse if you have (quite a lot of) time.
But the thing giving us a wee wry smile this morning is the realisation that if Tony Blair’s 1999 grab of 6000 square miles of Scottish sea is allowed to stand in post-Yes negotiations, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the “Clyde”, “Argyll” and “Fife” oilfields belong to the rUK, while “Britannia” belongs to Scotland.
Blair’s theft, aided and abetted by Donald Dewar and largely hushed-up by the media, is no laughing matter. But sometimes you just have to appreciate a nice bit of irony.
Feeling the Fear 321
Posted on
February 28, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve kept you waiting for this (at least, if you follow our Twitter account), but it’s worth it. An alert reader sent it to us last night, and it’s NOT one of our always-popular spoofs. To the best of our knowledge it’s 100% genuine.
That’s right – the latest desperate plea for cash from the No camp is a chain letter.
A sense of proportion 103
Posted on
February 28, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Standard Life, about which the entire Scottish media got incredibly excited about yesterday when they made a rather unremarkable statement which could be spun as a threat to leave Scotland if it voted Yes, employs around 5000 people north of the border. The aviation business, on the other hand, underpins the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Scots. Does it have a view on the subject?
That’s Willie Walsh, head of International Airlines Group (which owns British Airways), responding to a rather loaded question from BBC News by saying he’d regard independence as “a positive development”. That’s pretty interesting in itself, given that airlines are much more important to the Scottish economy than one insurance company, yet we have a strange premonition that it won’t attract the same headlines.
But it ties into politics a bit more directly than that too.
Double Standards 152
Posted on
February 27, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Credit ratings agencies are not, on the whole, noted for a reckless, devil-may-care approach to either personal or national finances. It’s not too often that you hear one say “Well, we don’t exactly know what’s coming in the future but what the heck, it’ll probably all work out fine in the end”.
So we were naturally more than a little curious to see the analysis released by Standard & Poor’s, one of the world’s key ratings agencies, of the likely state of an independent Scotland’s economy today.
