Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.
But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.
Today’s Daily Record has a swipe at Jeremy Corbyn for, well, let’s call them “mixed messages” over a second independence referendum. It suggests his Scottish branch manager Kezia Dugdale would have “her head in her hands” over his latest comments, which is a bit rich considering Dugdale’s own history on the subject.
And since her headline boast when she took over as leader of the North British office was that people would know exactly what Labour stood for (and indeed she spent all of the weekend’s keynote Sunday Politics interview listing all the things she’d been very very clear about), we thought we’d have a recap and see how that was going.
With all 32 councils now having declared, the Scottish local elections are over and the SNP have won again, taking 431 seats. Last time round in 2012 they took 425.
You might think you know the difference between 431 and 425. But you don’t.
Okay, so 2017 is turning out less dull than we expected.
Because the Prime Minister of the UK has lost her mind.
Scottish Labour’s regional branch manager (North Britain) clearly thought this was so important she needed to say it twice:
But that’s not helping us make any sense of it. All sarcasm and snark aside, we can’t figure out what on Earth it’s supposed to mean.
We don’t want to fall into the trap of portraying the Liberal Democrats as a party of any political relevance or consequence in Scotland, but for the sheer comedy value alone Willie Rennie’s interview with Gary Robertson on today’s Good Morning Scotland is worth a couple of minutes of your time.
So, are we all clear?
We weren’t sure we’d woken up properly when we read this morning’s Times.
“Much-trumpeted”? That’s, um, not quite how we remember things.
It’s morning in America, readers.
Judge Dredd: Origins was published in 2007, although in fact the basic story of how Bad Bob Booth became the last President of the USA and what he did next was established right back at the 1970s beginnings of Dredd’s parent comic 2000AD.
We actually have a theory that it’s all the Lib Dems’ fault.
Reiner Luyken is a 65-year-old German journalist who’s spent more than half of his life in the Highlands, and seems to have a knack for upsetting the neighbours.
We’re sure it was just an unfortunate one-off misunderstanding.
For some reason the Unionist community has this week been turning the bullhorn up to maximum on the subject of pensions. Most likely provoked by the publication of Dr Craig Dalzell’s fascinating “Beyond GERS”, the usual suspects have returned to the scaremongering tactics deployed during the indyref, attempting to terrorise the elderly with blood-curdling threats of destitution once again.
It’s a bewildering approach, given that the situation regarding pensions is one of the few around independence about which there is known certainty. The UK government already pays the state pension to millions of people outside the UK, under rules which would apply in exactly the same way if Scotland became a “foreign” country.
But just for fun, let’s look at exactly what the situation would be in the monumentally implausible event that Blair McDougall was telling the truth for once.
One of the videos below is a genuine “Better Together” campaign broadcast, pulled from TV at the last minute (despite costing £50,000 to make) and today revealed by Buzzfeed. The other is a spoof we made in June 2014.
Good luck figuring out which is the real one, folks.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
