Sky News earlier this morning:
Our ears always prick up when Kezia says she’s counted something herself.
Today the Scottish Parliament spent several hours heatedly debating a motion to call for a second Section 30 order to enable a new independence referendum (several more will follow tomorrow before the vote). We watched all of it so you didn’t have to, and are delighted to present you with a few clips that probably won’t make the news.
On such a momentous topic, this was the intervention that Scottish Labour list MSP Monica Lennon felt was the most pressing issue to raise, for example:
We’re very touched, obviously, and will add it to our file of other mentions in the chamber and elsewhere. But there were probably more important things to discuss.
Here’s the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, speaking to BBC News this morning and giving a striking illustration of the term “dancing on the head of a pin”.
Comically, his excuse for demanding another referendum on leaving the EU while opposing a second Scottish independence referendum is that his new EU vote would be a completely different question – he’d be asking voters if they wanted to accept the Brexit deal and exit from the EU (which one might reasonably summarise on the ballot paper as “Leave”), or to refuse to approve the deal and stay in the EU (or put another way, “Remain”).
Glad we cleared that up, then. But then it got weirder.
No 9: Mark, until recently from London.
Our favourite bit is at 27m 52s.
No 8: Elizabeth, from Bonnybridge.
Scottish leader Willie Rennie on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland:
We joke, of course. The Spanish government has made this position abundantly plain several times over a number of years, and it still doesn’t stop idiot Yoons (and media pundits who should know better) from spouting it.
But this time, in the flesh, it’s really quite hard to spin a way out of.
No.7: Erin, 15, from Gullane.
No.6: Christopher, from Stirling, biker.
No.5: Tom Morton, former BBC broadcaster and No campaigner.
It’s important to note, firstly, that the version of Sadiq Khan’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference he tweeted on Saturday morning simply flat-out said that Scottish nationalists were the same as racists and sectarian bigots. Its meaning was as clear as crystal to the Daily Record, a newspaper which is hardly hostile to Khan’s party.
“No difference” is a stark and unambiguous phrase. The speech did not contain the hastily-added qualifiers about “in this respect” and “of course I’m not saying the SNP are racist” which suddenly appeared when he read it out onstage that afternoon.
But which version did he really mean?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
