We have taken this out of context 61
But you have to admit it has a ring of truth about it.
(From tonight’s Scotland 2015.)
But you have to admit it has a ring of truth about it.
(From tonight’s Scotland 2015.)
Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.
Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.
The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.
Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.
In fact he abstained, along with roughly 80% of his Labour colleagues.
(NB The glitch in the middle of the clip is on the original broadcast.)
We weren’t going to do anything on last night’s episode of Australian news show 60 Minutes, because we assumed it would be all over the newspapers today, but they seem to be more concerned that an SNP MP followed someone who may have said some nasty things on Twitter. So here it is.
Be warned: some of it is difficult to watch. More details here.
This week, as the UK’s new Conservative government brought forward a bill to impose tax on renewable energy projects, just seven Labour MPs turned up to oppose it.
You know these guys that you used to see wandering round the city centre with a sandwich board telling us “THE END IS NIGH”? It seems they were right.
David Cameron, 16 September 2014 and 8 May 2015 respectively:
You get how it works now, right?
Yesterday we listed some of the nastier items from George Osborne’s horrifying 2015 budget that Labour had said they wouldn’t be opposing, including the public-sector payrise freeze, the reduction in the benefit cap and the slashing of child tax credit for families with more than two children.
On a BBC hustings debate today, Yvette Cooper extended the list.
The first five words of “The Vow” – the solemn pledge made by all three UK party leaders on the eve of the independence referendum – are “The Scottish Parliament is permanent”. This is what happened in the House of Commons this evening when the UK government was asked to make good on that pledge.
Is what we’re all about. Here’s David Mundell speaking during a fascinating Scotland Bill debate in the House of Commons this evening:
We should probably fact-check that, shouldn’t we? That’s what we do.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.