Archive for the ‘scottish politics’
10 Years On 58
For all of those who couldn’t make it to Saturday’s sold-out event at the IMAX:
As for the next 10 years, that’s another question.
An unduly restrictive view of salvation 88
Earlier today we heard from the SNP’s depute leader Keith Brown that the party now accepts there will never be another UK-sanctioned independence referendum.
And this afternoon in the chamber the SNP also voted against the only alternative.
Alba MSP Ash Regan laid down the above motion, which supports what as far as we knew was still the SNP’s official policy in the absence of another Section 30, in so far as they even know what their policy is.
Today that motion was voted down by 125 votes to 1.
Objection Sustained 41
This must be some kind of mistake.
Because we’re sure you’ve spent the last decade telling us that just couldn’t happen.
The Land Of Immunity 101
Astonishingly, there isn’t a single word of apology anywhere in this statement.
There isn’t a scintilla of contrition, not the tiniest glimmer of admission of culpability or responsibility. There isn’t even a weasel-worded expression of “regret”.
Rape Crisis Scotland is unfit for purpose, and its CEO must resign.
The Tartan Messiah 42
Well, Shauny‘s knocked it out of the park.
After the swarm 72
On 15 October 2012, I signed the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron to secure the independence referendum of September 2014.
On the same day Peter Kellner of the polling company YouGov wrote one of his condescending commentaries from London dissing any hope for the Yes campaign.
Kellner’s view was almost universal, and not just among the London pack of journos and politicians. Most, if not all, of the Scottish media agreed with him.
However, by September 2014 things looked very different.
A False Labelling 78
We’ve just watched the BBC’s new documentary, and we’re confused.
You can see both episodes on iPlayer now, or on TV tonight and tomorrow, but there’s no mistaking what’s being advertised – a personal drama between the two biggest players in Scottish politics in the last 300 years.
But that’s not what you get.
Coming Yet 63
The dogged persistence of alert Wings contributor Benjamin Harrop with regard to the Hamilton inquiry has been truly heroic, and today it has borne fruit in dramatic style.
The 10-page adjudication from the Scottish Information Commissioner that you can download by clicking that image is a somewhat labyrinthine (but fascinating) read, but the upshot of it is that the Commissioner has now ordered the Scottish Government to release all of the legal advice it was given with regard to its refusal to publish the written evidence submitted to James Hamilton for his inquiry into the events around the alleged conspiracy to falsely convict Alex Salmond of sexual assaults.
(See, even that one-sentence summary was quite hard going.)
But why does that matter and what does it mean?
The Last Legs 67
In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, performed a pair of amputations on two men. Neither of the men involved had anything physically wrong with them, but both were suffering from apotemnophilia – a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to have healthy limbs amputated.
Sufferers, counterintuitively, claim not to feel “whole” with four limbs and obsess over having their unwanted body parts chopped off. Smith argued the surgeries were life-saving, claiming the patients would commit suicide otherwise.
Apotemnophiles, like autogynephiles, insist that there is no erotic element, but it was later discovered that one of the men Smith operated on ran an amputee fetish website.
Upon investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical. Smith was banned from mutilating healthy bodies (although he was found not to have breached any of the hospital’s rules at the time and not sanctioned), and the dubious experiment ended.
But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality.