A strange interpretation 105
Posted on
October 20, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
Another lucky escape 115
Posted on
October 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers may recall that almost three years ago, the No campaign issued a series of dire warnings that independence could cause supermarket prices to rise:
Thankfully, by staying in the UK and therefore leaving the EU, Scotland etc etc.
Strange times 370
Posted on
October 05, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We fully endorse this message from LBC’s James O’Brien.
How it begins 258
Posted on
October 05, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It wasn’t easy to find a positive side for this.
But we suppose that it’ll at least be bleakly funny, whenever the second independence referendum comes round, watching Labour try to sell a vote for the UK as a vote for internationalist brotherhood and solidarity.
Out comes the whitewash 410
Posted on
October 04, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
To be honest, readers, we gave up on taking any notice of David Torrance‘s mundane attempts at trolling in the Herald some time ago. But some alert readers pointed us towards this week’s column, suggesting that it was a bald rewriting of history some way beyond their usual bland irritancy.
This was the passage they objected to:
It’s a patronising piece of “shut up and eat your cereal” condescension for sure. But to be fair to Torrance, it does also happen to be true. Wait, not true. The other thing.
Waiting on the guns 438
Posted on
October 02, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The starting pistol hasn’t actually been fired on the two-year Brexit process yet, but now we have a clear statement of when it will be: this morning on The Andrew Marr Show, the Prime Minister pledged that it would happen before the end of next March.
When she gave a speech to the Conservative conference later, Theresa May did even more than that. By the common consensus of the punditariat – whatever that’s worth these days – May’s message was that the UK was heading for the “hard” version of Brexit, with the single market sacrificed for control of borders.
(We might end up broke, in other words, but at least we’ll be good old British broke, with none of those awful smelly foreign Euro-Johnnies around to see it.)
And nobody was getting a sick note.
And for supporters of independence, that’s about as good as news gets.
The green and pleasant land 198
Posted on
September 30, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Daily Telegraph just released a video called “100 Reasons Why Brexit Was A Good Thing”. It listed them to a soundtrack of “Jerusalem”, the same song that closed the Labour Party conference earlier this week with its stirring ode to just one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.
100 reasons why #Brexit was a good thing pic.twitter.com/s2gyYSDUzJ
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 30, 2016
We’ve saved a few of the highlights below, just in case the Telegraph should delete the video in a fit of sanity. We’ve also added one fake one. See if you can spot it.
Just your imagination 396
Posted on
September 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From a ridiculous piece by Hadley Freeman in today’s Guardian:
Actually, we’re pretty sure it isn’t and we can.
The squandered bounty 434
Posted on
September 22, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s long been a bone of contention for Scots – and not just nationalists – that the UK government, by common agreement, wasted the vast wealth windfall of the North Sea on funding Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s programme of deliberate de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and bribes to the working class in the form of Right To Buy.
It did so rather than investing the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund, as demanded by the SNP (and some elements of Labour) and practiced in Norway, whose fund – only set up in 1990 – is now a literal embarrassment of riches.
But the reality is even worse than that. Because according to a 2015 report by the National Resource Governance Institute that’s just come to our attention, the truth is that if the UK had managed its North Sea treasure better, it could have done both.
