From here:
(NB These rules do not apply to Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, etc etc. Like, duh. In a properly democratic country we’d be able to use FOI to actually see the blacklist, but this is the BBC we’re talking about.)
With 14 hours to go:
Like, wow, readers đ
“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”
[click]
The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.
With regard to this, some important commentary:
(And some more.)
Previous episodes in the series are here. If you’ve got a story like this to tell, or you know anyone who does, Phantom Power want to hear from you – drop them a line.
We’ll be honest, readers – if this doesn’t make you want to leave the UK all by itself, it may be that there’s nothing that ever will and we should just give up.
(Alternative titles considered for this piece included Live And Please Let Die, Doctor Oh God No, The Barely-Living Daylights and Quantum Of Bollocks.)
This documentary starts a little slowly, but becomes an eye-opening case study of how Labour steamrollered through crippling PFI contracts to build public infrastructure on the never-never when they ran the Scottish Executive from 1999-2007.
We highly recommend giving it a watch.
We referenced this a few days ago because we definitely remembered it happening, but we’d been unable to actually locate the evidence, and at Wings Over Scotland that sort of thing bothers us. After a very considerable amount of effort we’ve now tracked it down, so we’re bunging it up here to preserve it for the record.
(At that point host Frank Skinner gave up and moved on.)
It’s from one month after the indyref, and the interesting thing is that Robinson is twice given the opportunity to respond to Skinner’s question about whether he thought that the pro-Yes supporters had any sort of fair point about his alleged bias, and both times – rather than, say, just dismissing it with a quick “Of course not” – he ducks it.
Readers can, as always, make their own judgements.
Amid the horror of events in Catalonia yesterday, the Prime Minister of the UK – quite unintentionally – said something during an interview on the Andrew Marr Show which was highly pertinent not only to the Catalan referendum but to British domestic politics too. We thought it needed saving for the record.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
