This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.
It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.
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Tags: the positive case for the union
Category
comment, reference, scottish politics, uk politics
Now here’s an explosive thing to drop at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night.
Click the image to read the full Financial Times story. Did the game just change?
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
It’s a fortunate thing, viewers, that we have a strong will, hardened by years of dreich, endless 1970s Sundays in Scotland with only three channels on the telly (each of them showing programmes entirely about farming and God), everything outside shut except the rainclouds, and nothing to look forward to but school in the morning.
Because otherwise the frustrations of yesterday’s site problems, followed by waking up this morning to be faced with papers stuffed to the brim with miserable, bleating old Scottish Labour dinosaurs with torn coupons and long catalogues of whinges about you-know-who and you-know-what might just have pushed us over the edge.
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Tags: crybabies
Category
comment, scottish politics
Hello again! We apologise for the recent 19-hour interruption to normal Wings Over Scotland service, which was almost certainly the result of a cyber-attack by the KGB.
Not really, of course. A combination of a badly-coded plugin, human error and the global curse of spam comments is most likely what actually took us offline for most of yesterday and this morning. But in the light of today’s Sunday Herald front-page scoop, it’s hard to be absolutely sure.
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Category
comment, scottish politics, world
…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.
“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)
So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.
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Tags: and finallyhypocrisysmears
Category
comment, idiots, scottish politics, uk politics
It says something about the baleful influence of the right-wing press (not to mention Tory, UKIP and Labour politicians desperate to seek its favour) that some people in Scotland mention immigration as a reason for voting No.
Of the many scare stories originating south of the border, this one is among the least applicable to Scotland. (But is still perpetuated in the media because no major Scottish newspapers are actually owned here.) Scotland needs immigrants, and without sustained immigration over the next half century, we could be in trouble.
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Tags: Andrew Leslie
Category
analysis, europe, scottish politics, uk politics
