The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.
Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.
Today is one of those times.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
Category
analysis, comment, europe, media, scottish politics, uk politics
We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.
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Tags: confused
Category
scottish politics, uk politics, wtf
The wording of that headline isn’t strictly accurate, because the Claim Of Right For Scotland – signed in 1989 by over 80% of Scottish MPs, and many other politicians and representatives of “civic Scotland” – isn’t a law, and has no binding force.
Nevertheless, it’s a document that carries a certain amount of political weight, as an open acknowledgement by Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the people of Scotland (not Parliament and the monarch, as is the case in England) are sovereign and are entitled to determine the form of government they want.
Up to a point, anyway.
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Tags: vote no get nothing
Category
analysis, history, scottish politics
In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.
Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.
Category
scottish politics, stats, uk politics
Now and again, the independence debate gets so dismally stupid that we despair for a few hours and just sit around with our head in our hands trying to understand how professional, apparently-rational people can be so hopelessly, galactically thick.
Today the trigger was The Times, which issued the latest in a flurry of “post-White Paper” polls that have appeared with indecent haste and proclaimed the document’s failure, this time under the ridiculous headline “Poll sinks hope for a ‘yes’ vote”.
Do we even need to write the next bit? Does it really have to be spelled out?
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.
Yikes!
Category
disturbing, leaks, pictures, scottish politics, uk politics
Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.
(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)
We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.
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Tags: hypocrisy
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
Actually, we hear this one was meant for internal use only.
Tags: and finally
Category
leaks, pictures, scottish politics
We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:
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Tags: misinformationsmears
Category
culture, scottish politics, world
Oh dear lord. The No campaign really does seem hell-bent on making life hard for those of us who occasionally enjoy mocking it by (slightly) exaggerating the depths of its “Project Fear” scaremongering strategy. They’ve attempted to terrify Scots with uncertainty over the price of stamps, mobile-phone roaming charges and having to buy in Strictly Come Dancing, but none of it’s worked.
So now they’re pulling out the big guns: baked beans.
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Tags: project fear
Category
analysis, scottish politics
