Learning to fall 314
Posted on
October 01, 2016 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
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.
The soggy deckchairs 214
Posted on
September 21, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With the greatest of reluctance, and only in the absence of anything even remotely more interesting, then, let’s have a few words on Scottish Labour’s latest solemn and sincere declaration of its full, total, complete and utter autonomy.
Because while the media is reporting the development that UK Labour has decided to extend a few extra inches of lead to Kezia Dugdale’s branch office as if it had the slightest importance to anything, it seems oddly reluctant to ask the obvious question.
Moving on 566
Posted on
September 19, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:
It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?
Heads they win, tails you lose 283
Posted on
September 14, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve been poring over the fascinating document released yesterday by the Fraser Of Allander Institute, examining in detail the prospects for the Scottish Government’s budget in the coming years.
Admittedly at first we were chiefly doing it in order to embarrass the increasingly angry and belligerent BBC presenter Andrew Neil, who insisted repeatedly last year that there’d been no real-terms cut to the Holyrood budget since the Tories came to power.
That claim put Neil at odds with all manner of people pointing out that the opposite was true, to which we can now add the FoAI:
But we already knew Andrew Neil was an idiot, so that was no big deal. It was another chart in the document that caught our eye and made us think.
Notice of rule change 267
Posted on
September 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Junkies, tramps and thieves 343
Posted on
September 02, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Fear and lies work. Over many decades (and really for centuries) the Unionist parties and the media have succeeded in persuading a large percentage of Scots that they’re beggars, scroungers, vagrants and “subsidy junkies” dependent on the ever-generous charity of England to keep them from starvation.
And in terms of the facts, that hasn’t always been an easy sell.
How to lose forever 91
Posted on
August 26, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This is the demented, McCarthyite state of madness the Labour Party has reached:
This is a party now openly rejecting anyone as a member who has ever supported any other party. We’d take a minute to try to explain to them how the arithmetic of that one works out, but they’re a long, long way beyond the grasp of reason now.
Not a dry seat in the house 140
Posted on
August 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This can’t be a good sign.
