Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:
It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”
This is the last of the political data from our Panelbase survey of Scottish opinion. The full data tables should now be available to the media from the pollster.
(But a quick word to all the Scottish journalists who we know read this site – had a single one of you had the courtesy, wit or basic journalistic initiative to actually contact us and ask us for the tables directly, we’d gladly have given them to you 24 hours before your competitors. Just a wee tip there.)
We know our chums at “Better Together” have been looking forward to this one for days, so we won’t keep them waiting any longer.
David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:
If you hate listening to audio or watching video (as opposed to reading the printed word) as much as we do, or if you’re just at work and can’t, here’s a complete transcript – courtesy of one of our splendid readers – of this morning’s BBC Breakfast appearance from UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.
Once again, the very last line of the transcript is the killer.
You might want to wrap some bandaging around your jaw before listening to this BBC News interview with UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom this morning, to keep it off the floor.
It gets more and more mindboggling as it goes on. But it’s not the chilling thing.
You might find this an interesting read.
(No, we have no idea why his face is so shiny.)
One of the benefits, if that’s the right word, of the Daily Record’s shambolic new iPad app is that the 30-day trial period means we got to see a print copy of the Sunday Mail today for the first time in years. It was largely like a parochial edition of Heat magazine (“FAT LASS DATES THIN BLOKE” got a spread), but buried 40-odd pages in was a “special report” that doesn’t seem to have made it onto the paper’s website.
The Mail accompanies the report with an editorial entitled “We must not abandon our Geordie pals”, which is very carefully worded in order to give the impression that a Yes vote would be to do just that, without actually saying so. But the actual content of the report is curiously at odds with the headlines.
Last year’s argument over the referendum franchise saw the Scottish Government’s view win the day – that the matter should be decided according to a civic definition of nationality, rather than along the ethnic lines proposed by some in the No camp.
But what of the people of non-Scottish ethnic origin who’ve been thus enfranchised and entrusted with the future of the nation they’ve chosen to make their home?
It’s been an interesting week for the Scottish media. First the Sun’s website vanished behind the clouds of a paywall, and today the Daily Record unveiled a new version of its tablet app which no longer gives readers the weekday paper for free.
(Both papers, naturally, presented these new restrictions as enhancements.)
Some of the more cynical independence supporters among our readership may today be asking themselves “What is it that Labour are trying to bury today with all this ludicrously farcical ‘Labour For Independence’ business?”
Allow us to suggest a few possibilities.
For some reason which escapes our understanding, the operator of the misleadingly-named “Scottish Labour” Twitter account chose to tweet this message this afternoon.
We know the answer, but we’re jiggered if we get the point.
It’s very rare, viewers, that we get so angry in the course of writing a post that we have to stop.
But when we ran a picture last night of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP, opening a foodbank with a cretinous smile on his face as if being a member of the government of a modern industrial nation in need of foodbanks was something to be happy about, a reader suggested making a gallery of similar images.
This is as many as we could bear.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
