The last leap 443
Posted on
April 22, 2017 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
The selective calculator 126
Posted on
April 21, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers will be aware that we’ve been running a series of posts pointing out the gap between opposition rhetoric about the Scottish Government’s supposed failure to grow the economy, and their (total lack of) practical suggestions about what it should actually be doing, given that by design the Scottish Parliament controls almost none of the country’s economic levers.
And we thought a story fed to the press by Labour this week about job creation since the Tories came to power in 2010 was going to be just another case in point, until we spotted something else about it.
Now, we can’t claim to be exactly astonished that the Tories have mostly focused on creating work in London and the South-East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK. That’s pretty much their thing. But Scottish Labour’s noted rentahonk Jackie Baillie was hopping mad, and not only at the Tories.
A moment of candour 124
Posted on
April 20, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We don’t often wholeheartedly agree with anything “Rape Clause Ruth” Davidson says at First Minister’s Questions, but we can’t fault this observation from earlier today.
Rushing to the gallows 399
Posted on
April 19, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
One of the most famous tales of the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint is that concerning James Inglis, a murderer who in 1951 sprinted the short distance from the condemned cell to the noose, enabling the entire execution to be concluded just seven seconds after Pierrepoint had first laid hands on him.
We can’t help thinking of it today.
The end of sanity 751
Posted on
April 18, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Okay, so 2017 is turning out less dull than we expected.
Because the Prime Minister of the UK has lost her mind.
Anywhere but Scotland 326
Posted on
April 13, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So far as we can tell, the primary occupation of chunky former “Better Together” head honcho, Scottish Labour apparatchik and tuba enthusiast Blair McDougall these days – he appears to be otherwise unemployed – is posting endlessly on Twitter about how the UK would rob Scottish pensioners who’ve paid National Insurance to the UK for their whole lives in the event of Scotland voting for independence.
We’ve never been quite sure why that’s supposed to be a great selling point for how fabulous the UK is – “Don’t leave us or we’ll starve you to death” – but in any event it was dealt something of a blow yesterday by McDougall’s own party.
The image referred to a brand-new “pledge card” issued by Labour yesterday, which promised not only to maintain payment of the UK pension to pensioners living abroad anywhere in the world but to uprate it in line with inflation, avoiding situations like that of eldsters who’ve retired to countries which don’t have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK and therefore face a continual slide in the real value of their pension.
It certainly didn’t say anything about “with the sole exception of if they happen to live in Scotland”, but maybe there just wasn’t enough room.
The Tory Calculator 419
Posted on
March 29, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The figure below is my own, but it’s also remarkably typical:
Click the pic to get yours.
(It actually feels like a lot more than that – quite possibly because I have, in fact, not for one minute of my entire life been represented by a government at Westminster – or anywhere else, come to that – that I voted for, unless you count the token presence of the Lib Dems in the 2010-15 coalition. Which I don’t, because they immediately betrayed every policy and principle for which I’d voted for them in the first place.)
For Scotland, democracy in the UK simply doesn’t work.
If it hits you in the eye 301
Posted on
March 24, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.
It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.
Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.
And it’s not hard to see why.
