Nick Clegg signs a pledge 265
Posted on
August 05, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘wtf’
Missing: one plot 140
Posted on
July 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We can only assume the No campaign and media are in a growing panic about the imminent TV showdown between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling or something. Even by the high previous standards of insanity from the UK side of the referendum debate, this week has seen something of a disintegration in sanity.
Apart from the usual flood of mad scare stories, we’ve had papers like the Scotsman, Daily Record and Press & Journal promoting a ludicrous poll of a couple of hundred hand-picked expats. We’ve had the Guardian’s Martin Kettle competing with the Mail’s Simon Heffer for the most embarrassingly moronic vision of a post-independence future yet committed to print. (This time, a Yes vote sparks a new civil war in Ireland.)
And then there’s this:
Commonwealth Games begin 355
Posted on
July 23, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Scotland enjoys the opening ceremony.
The BBC, home of the facts 387
Posted on
July 23, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s an article on the BBC website today with the self-explanatory title of “Scottish independence: How would the UK fare without Scotland?”
On the left is what it said yesterday (that losing Scotland would be bad for the UK). On the right is what it says today (that losing Scotland would be good for the UK).
Does anyone know what calamity befell Scotland’s economy overnight?
Return of the living dead 207
Posted on
July 20, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
For independence supporters of a certain age, the 1979 devolution referendum is one of the most infamous moments in Scottish history. While a wafer-thin majority of Scots voted Yes to devolution, an electoral fiddle conceived by a Labour MP meant that it didn’t happen, and part of the reason was that in effect, dead people were counted as No votes.
(We won’t go into all the details here, but basically an impossible threshold was set for turnout, and people who’d died but hadn’t yet been removed from the electoral roll were counted towards the calculation of that threshold.)
We were put in mind of it by an odd development this evening.
The guest editor 146
Posted on
July 12, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.
We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.
This could be a record 259
Posted on
July 05, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.
For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.
Twitching corpse stamped on 287
Posted on
June 13, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir has a piece today on the nasty comments a tiny handful of idiots made to JK Rowling this week, which – unlike the alleged “barrage” of abuse supposedly unleashed against Labour activist Clare Lally – can at least definitely be said to have happened.
The piece is a tedious one-sided rant, but at the end something awesome happens.
The missing (hundreds of) millions 114
Posted on
June 04, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.
(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)
We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.
Another one of our blackouts 142
Posted on
June 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.
(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)
Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.
Working for the Yankee dollar 148
Posted on
May 18, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s been a grim sort of day today, so let’s finish off with something a bit lighter.
We highly recommend reading the entire thing. It seems not to be a spoof.
This is not a spoof 180
Posted on
May 16, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We have not made this story up. It’s not the work of BBC Scotlandshire.
Just casually, there, beneath an unassuming, innocuous headline. No big deal.
