Meanwhile in the newspapers 96
Posted on
March 08, 2014 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
Nationalist of the week 109
Posted on
March 07, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From the Norwich Evening News, 4 March 2014:
“‘It is ridiculous that independence for Scotland is even being given consideration at all.
Much blood was spilled over centuries to bring the home nations together.
It’s disrespectful to the honour of those that suffered to think that a cross on a ballot paper can undo that. National pride and patriotism is what being a Scot is all about, and there is not a nation in the world that has more of it than Scotland. We don’t need economic independence to prove it.’
Blair Ainslie is managing director of Great Yarmouth-based offshore firm Seajacks. He hails from Dunbar, East Lothian and moved south of the border in 1979.”
That one’s making our head spin.
Mightier than the sword 87
Posted on
March 06, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As we noted last week, Eton- and Sandhurst-educated Sir Norman Arthur, figurehead of the No campaign’s latest high-powered grassroots fundraising drive, has a very impressive military record – Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, General Officer Commanding of the 3rd Armoured Division, General Officer Commanding of Scotland and mentioned in despatches during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
It’s just lucky the IRA didn’t have Twitter, or things might have been different.
A tried and trusted strategy 96
Posted on
March 04, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Does any of this sound familiar, readers?
Why we shouldn’t do walking away 107
Posted on
March 04, 2014 by
Andrew Leslie
When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):
“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”
The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.
So we can just forget about it, right?
Remember what they think of you 114
Posted on
March 04, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Prominent New Labour writer Dan Hodges has a piece in the Telegraph today (because where else would a New Labour commentator have a column?) about UKIP now being an openly racist party. It contains the following passage:
We’ll leave aside that the protest was nothing to do with the SNP or Scottish nationalists, that it was organised by a radical left-wing group and that one of the two men arrested in connection with the incident was in fact English himself. None of those factual inconveniences are allowed to get in the way of Hodges’ bigotry.
Damn that uncertainty 139
Posted on
March 03, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
After the gold rush 309
Posted on
February 25, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve got a lot to do tonight, readers, so this is just a quick passing thought. We’re constantly told, among the endlessly contradictory stories about oil, that the biggest problem with it is that it’s running out. Production is declining, they say, and what’s left is harder and more expensive to get to and might not be worth all the bother.
We can’t be independent, then, because while we might be fine for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, after that we’ll be knackered and bankrupt. (Which assumes we don’t find any more oil west of Shetland, or in the Clyde Basin, and that we’re too incompetent to build a lucrative renewables sector in four decades, and that we weren’t able to budget for an oil fund. But let’s go with it for now.)
There’s one question nobody asks, though.
Tory Cabinet visits Scotland 63
Posted on
February 25, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE:
Bad news rapidly improves 112
Posted on
February 24, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A story from Reuters tonight:
Ooft. How big is this majority of the chairmen of the 100 leading companies, then?
Woah there! 65% of 32? Isn’t that, um, 21? That’s not really a “majority” of 100, is it? And while we’re here, how many of the chairmen of FTSE 100 companies have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum anyway? We have a strong suspicion that the effective sample in this survey might actually have been zero.
