Here we are again 166
A tale of two timestamps 379
No fire in the Reichstag 196
Hubris: A Warning From History 126
We had a brief but semi-enlightening debate on Twitter with some daft young idiot from Scottish Labour this morning, which culminated in his desperately clutching at votes for the Tories and Lib Dems last month as somehow representing a victory for Labour.
Readers can pass an idle moment by identifying all the obvious logical flaws in that tweet for themselves, but it did lead us to a striking realisation, which we instinctively knew was true but still had to double-check because it seems so ridiculous.
Prisoners of time 462
So we’ve got a couple of weeks to wait to find out what the SNP’s grand plan that they should have had ready yesterday was, and in the absence of anything better to do we suppose we might as well speculate on the possibilities.
WARNING: if you’re one of the decreasing rump of ultra-faithful still clinging to the idea of a new indyref in 2020, don’t build your hopes up.
There Is No Plan A 301
So it’s finally official: Boris Says No. He’s formally done the thing that we’ve all known he was going to do ever since he became UK Prime Minister last July.
So what’s the stunning, game-changing counter-response we’ve got for him, having known for six months that this was what he’d say and had all that time to prepare for it? What’s the stroke of strategic genius that all those SNP loyalists insisted we had up our sleeve and just weren’t revealing until the key moment?
“We’re going to wait for however long it takes for the Westminster establishment to accept that another referendum is inevitable.”
Brilliant. What a plan. To the barricades, everyone.
The Toady And The Trap 291
Anyone who’s followed the UK political media over the last decade or so with specific reference to Scotland will know that in a very crowded field, the standout poster boy for arrogant, condescending metropolitan cluelessness is the Independent’s chief political commentator John Rentoul.
For reasons which escape us, Rentoul – who was born in India and as far as we know has spent not a single day of his life resident in Scotland – identifies as Scottish. And yet he doesn’t appear to even recognise the concept of Scotland as a political entity, and today he demonstrated that fact in a manner so stark and striking that it’s worth recording for posterity.
From the archives #12 410
Over the last few days, for want of anything more interesting happening in Scottish politics, we’ve been reviewing some of the entertainingly fluid criteria by which Unionist politicians used to assert that Scotland could supposedly achieve independence. But we hadn’t seen this one before:
A view apparently “almost universally shared among English Tory backbenchers” back in the late 1980s was that independence could be won by the SNP securing a majority of Scottish MPs at not one but two successive UK general elections.
Given that that line has now been crossed in THREE Westminster elections in a row, we’re all agog to find where Boris Johnson will move the goalposts to in his keenly-awaited response to the Scottish Government’s second Section 30 request, which he’s due to deliver any minute now.


























