We couldn’t help but notice Labour peer, Stalin-moustache enthusiast and celebrity Bobby Ball lookalike Lord/Baron Robert Winston standing at the front of the party’s boorish stag-party gathering of MPs and MSPs in Glasgow yesterday, as Ed Miliband railed against the dastardly SNP and insisted that the NHS wasn’t under threat.
(We didn’t see Andy Burnham among the MPs in the footage, so we assume he was still down in London telling anyone who’ll listen that the NHS is under threat.)
And we couldn’t help wondering whether the peer’s presence was a tacit endorsement by Miliband of his proposal to charge people £120 a year to visit their GP.
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Category
analysis, disturbing, scottish politics, uk politics
Earlier today we showed you a clip from a press conference in which Alex Salmond schooled the BBC’s Nick Robinson in some basic financial facts about Corporation Tax, and went on to make a serious allegation about wrongdoing between the BBC and the UK Treasury, in which he claimed that the latter had broken Parliamentary rules by leaking market-sensitive information about RBS.
The BBC dutifully reported the story later in the day.
And as far as we can gather, the First Minister has everyone bang to rights.
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comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics, uk politics
From a press conference a few minutes ago:
We must admit, this is our favoured mode for the First Minister.
Tags: misinformation
Category
scottish politics, uk politics, video
Yesterday the three UK party leaders all came to Scotland to “campaign”. None of them would appear in public or be interviewed on TV, speaking only to small crowds of invited supporters before scurrying south again. Nevertheless, their fleeting presence north of the border meant that the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions was conducted by substitutes. Standing in for David Cameron was William Hague.
So that’s all a bit clearer now.
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comment, history, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve long argued that whatever the small print, when it comes to an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union common sense and realpolitik will prevail, because nobody wants Scotland to be out of the EU for even a day and it’s in nobody’s interests for it to be.
Of course, we’re just some idiots with a website and nobody should listen to OUR opinion about anything. But it seems as though people like Graham Avery (Honorary Director-General of the European Commission), Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, (the former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN) and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, (author of a book on EU constitutional law and professor of European law and human rights at Oxford University) ought to have a pretty good inside track on Europe stuff.
And if all those still aren’t enough, how about the esteemed Pat Cox, former President of the European Parliament? He ought to know what he’s talking about, right?
Category
comment, europe, scottish politics, uk politics, video
First Owen Jones’ stinging rebuff to the odious fauxcialist John McTernan, now this:
As another famous Unionist might say: Oooft!
Category
comment, uk politics
The alert readers of this site have encountered currency trader Alpesh Patel of equity company Praefinium Partners before. We were more than a little bit scathing about a previous appearance of his on the BBC News channel back in February, on which it seems fair to say that he nailed his Unionist colours very firmly indeed to the mast.
So this clip from the same channel this morning was interesting.
We don’t think his words need any comment from us, save perhaps that we commend Mr Patel for having learned from his previous errors when it comes to assessing the attitude of businesses to the prospect of Scottish independence. Anyone can make a mistake. The key is to not keep repeating it when the evidence proves you wrong.
Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics, video
Save it from what, exactly? Democracy?
(More here.)
Category
comment, culture, media, scottish politics, uk politics
