Knight follows day 90
Posted on
June 10, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
You’ll never guess what’s happened, readers.
At least they left a slightly more decent interval than with Michelle Mone.
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
Hawks and doves 132
Posted on
June 07, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last month Scotland on Sunday published some findings from a poll covering, among other things, backing for Trident and for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit vote.
We didn’t think much about it until a reader told us that Labour MSP Jackie Baillie had trumpeted the Trident result – a wafer-thin 43-42 majority in favour – in her column in the Helensburgh Advertiser. We were curious to see the finer details and set about finding the full data tables for the poll, which was conducted by ICM.
(Under British Polling Council rules, pollsters have to release full data within 48 hours of any headline findings being made public.)
Weirdly, they didn’t exist.
Yeah, that ought to do it 245
Posted on
May 30, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re a bit behind, but we only just saw this.
Suddenly a 70% Remain vote in Scotland looks like a conservative estimate.
A change in values 140
Posted on
May 30, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s been a lot of chat on social media recently commenting on what seems to be a rather low-key approach to the Tory election fraud story.
Despite having the potential to cast the result of the UK general election into doubt, with dozens of Tory MPs under suspicion of being elected illegally, press coverage – particularly on the BBC – has been noticeably thin on the ground compared to, say, the days and weeks of sustained, new-content-free reporting on Michelle Thomson’s business affairs or Stewart Hosie and Angus MacNeil’s love lives.
(We learned very recently, of course, that the police still haven’t even spoken to Ms Thomson, over eight months after the allegations came to light.)
But even we were startled by this:
Yes, if you type “Tory election fraud” into the BBC website, the top result is for some unfathomable reason an article about Hosie and MacNeil, who are neither Tories nor under investigation for any kind of fraud.
Indeed, the current Tory election fraud story is nowhere to be found at all – the next most recent item on the page is from 2012 and about the Liberal Democrats.
We’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions.
Four minutes of fun 336
Posted on
April 29, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This evening’s Question Time saw one of the most incident-packed passages on the show in recent memory. From left to right onscreen the panellists were Paul Marshall (hedge fund manager, head of a chain of academy schools and co-author of the Lib Dems’ infamous “Orange Book”), Alex Salmond, Tory minister Greg Clark, Labour’s shadow home secretary Andy Burnham and right-wing think-tanker Jill Kirby.
We’ll let you watch for yourself.
They Are The People 328
Posted on
April 22, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We might just not post anything again until the second referendum.
All you need to know about the budget 156
Posted on
March 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
…but were probably genuinely afraid to ask.
Tories, there. Thank goodness we’re better together, eh readers?
Welfare for the wealthy 180
Posted on
March 14, 2016 by
Russell Bruce
There are two very different kinds of welfare in the UK. One is the kind that primarily benefits poor people, which is under remorseless attack from the government.
But there’s another kind too, for which there’s still a bottomless pit of cash.
Louder than lovebombs 171
Posted on
March 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:
“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
The five key facts about GERS 216
Posted on
March 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
[EDIT 24 August 2016: This article has now been updated here.]
It’s Sunday, so there is of course one last convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles in all the papers, as every Unionist hack and pundit in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.
Everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how Scottish revenue this year being 1% lower than it was last year has comprehensively demolished a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.
So before everyone moves on to a new “SCOTLAND BAD” next week, we thought it was worth a short recap of what we’ve learned about a devolved Scotland’s financial books this week.
Because for all the complex arguments, mad comedy graphs ludicrously pretending that Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and bewildering arrays of incomprehensible stats, there are only five things you really need to know about GERS.
