In the end, the people of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse made fools of us all.
Because nobody, but nobody, saw that result coming.
We must admit, we don’t quite get what the Daily Record is trying to achieve.
Having already told its dwindling band of readers that voting for both the SNP and Labour is the only way to stop Reform in today’s Hamilton by-election, for the last two days it’s deployed some random loony in a hard hat and the vegan former Rangers captain Graeme Souness to the same ostensible end.
Souness, famously a supporter of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives, tells Record readers today that they must vote Labour in order to prevent Thatcher’s right-wing heirs from winning the seat – even though Labour are dead, plucked, stuffed and cooked geese in the eyes of the bookmakers and voting for them only increases the chances of both Reform AND the SNP.
A few weeks ago we had a thought. And it seemed quite an interesting thought, so we decided to commission a poll on it from our old pals at Norstat.
63-37? Well, there’s your clear and overwhelming support.
This is what Labour say in Scotland:
And this is what they say elsewhere, when they think nobody in Scotland is looking:
One day someone’s going to tell them about the internet, and our life’s going to get a lot more difficult. Until that day, though, let’s just enjoy the laughs.
If you’ve been reading Scottish social media or the Scottish press for the last year and a half or so, the following graph is going to come as a bit of a shock to you.
But there it is all the same.
We’ve just taken delivery of some REALLY interesting polling results, readers, but it’s going to take a while to fully analyse and write them up, so in the meantime let’s look at some slightly less interesting ones which came from the same poll – the Norstat one commissioned by the Sunday Times and published today, which we hitched a lift on.
The headline figures show an eight-point Yes lead, which is nice, although it’s also entirely abstract since the SNP has no current policy for translating independence support into actual independence (or even another referendum about it).
All the same, it seemed a good time to assess the wider picture.
If you’re a fan of lazy, superficial political analysis from the mentally unwell, you might have read this week about John Swinney’s great strategic triumph of having “coaxed” an “endorsement” out of the Daily Record for Thursday’s by-election in Hamilton.
And if so, you might be forgiven for thinking that that analysis looks pretty stupid now.
(Holiday Boy is still jetting his way around the globe, and indeed will be for the next few weeks, so in the absence of cartoons what else can we do but look at comics?)
But what, if anything, do those front pages tell us?
Alert readers will be familiar with this site’s ongoing quest for an explanation as to why controversy-plagued charity LGBT Youth Scotland continues to operate in dozens of Scottish primary and even nursery schools, pushing gender ideology onto children as young as four despite only having a remit to support 13-25-year-olds.
Last month we were, to coin a phrase, stonewalled by Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR, but we filed a review request and today we received – a couple of weeks past the deadline – a response.
Below is a quick video of it.
The entire Scottish media and professional-politician community is currently in a self-righteous froth about a campaign ad being run by Reform for the Hamilton by-election targeting Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.
Obviously none of the acres of press coverage trusts voters to see the ad and decide for themselves, because that simply isn’t how journalism works nowadays. You’re told that a bad thing happened – whether it be a campaign ad, a comedian’s joke or the supposed terrible abuse sent to a celebrity – and how outraged various pundits or other celebrities are about it, with the clear implication that you should feel the same, but you almost never get shown or told what was actually said.
So to start with, as a basic journalistic principle, here’s the ad itself in its entirety.
Now let’s look at what you’re being ordered to think about it.
Whoever advised John Swinney to do this should be tarred, feathered and fired.
Because incredibly, the sheer abject patheticness of it isn’t even the biggest problem.
Don Paterson is a celebrated Scottish poet, writer and musician. The essay below comes from a new anthology of Scottish writers called Irish Pages: Scotland, and is reproduced with his permission.
Remember The Vow? Most of us have tried to forget it. This was Westminster’s Hail Mary as polling day approached in the 2014 referendum; a vote that Yessers – people tend to forget this part too – initially had no real expectation of winning, until an inspirationally positive campaign saw the polls draw neck-and-neck.
Then lo! There it was, splashed across the Daily Record: a fancy-font promise from Westminster party leaders that if Scotland voted to stay within the UK, we would enjoy new devolved powers. There was some other waffle about defence and opportunities and having an equal share in the UK’s prosperity. But the message was clear enough. We would be listened to.
Aye, right.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
