Another policy change 76
Well, this is odd. An alert reader has sent us the response they just received from the BBC to a question about our recent banning from YouTube, and it’s curious.
“No discretion”, eh? That’s not what they said last week.
The National Enquirers 122
The data in this Scottish Government reply to an alert reader this week pretty much speaks for itself, so we’re not going to add too much to it.
The number of FOI requests submitted to the Scottish Government by the BBC in the past three years (112) is more than 25% higher than the total number submitted in the previous seven years (89).
The number submitted by Labour in 2017 was more than TEN TIMES as many as it submitted in 2008, and twice as many as any other year.
The number submitted by the Tories in 2017 was a third more than the total number submitted in the previous NINE years (92). They’ve also exceeded that total in the first seven months of this year alone.
And as the highlighted passage notes, the true numbers are considerably higher.
A sad, sad robot all alone 139
It really takes some going to stand out for especially terrible journalism in the Scottish press this week, given the vast acres of page-space that are still being devoted to truly abysmal, and borderline legally-actionable, barrel-scraping articles about the recent allegations made against Alex Salmond. So hats off to perhaps the only man who could possibly have achieved it.
Ladies and gentlemen, who else but David Leask?
Let’s see just who we meet, shall we?
The eternal mystery 141
It’s around this time of year that we always enjoy a delve in the impenetrable enigma that is the membership of Scottish Labour. (As gathered together in the picture below during Jeremy Corbyn’s last trip to Edinburgh.)
The curse of life 80
The Scottish media has really had to scrape the barrel to give a negative spin to some NHS stats today. The Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Record and Scotsman all feature a story concerning an increase in ambulance waiting times, noting that the number of callouts taking more than ten minutes has doubled in four years.
What they’re a lot more reluctant to reveal is that the reason for that is a deliberate policy change which has meant ambulances have been saving more people’s lives.
An uncommon act 267
Scotland’s newspapers are just one gigantic filthy avalanche of stinking, poisonous sewage today. They’re a disgrace to both journalism and humanity, and if we started listing the reasons why we wouldn’t be finished until sometime on Tuesday.
(Although some of it’s leaked out onto Twitter already.)
So instead, we’re going to do something we haven’t done before and probably never will again: we’re going to link you – unironically, unsarcastically and unarchived – to a post on the blog of the hyper-extremist SNP-hating BritNat fundamentalist zoombat “Effie Deans”, because astonishingly it occupies a moral plane infinitely far above any of the gutter-dredging, hate-crazed scum working in Scotland’s professional media.
That’s how far they’ve sunk. Effie Deans is looking down on them like an astronaut gazing from high orbit into the darkest depths of the Marianas Trench.
This is it here. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.
Absolute Riddy Of The Day (25-08-18) 99
GERS Week is always a good time to catch Unionists saying mad stuff. But in the midst of a rant last night about (genuinely) how countries aren’t best running their own affairs but having other countries do it for them, the former “Better Together” chief, recent spectacularly failed Labour candidate and current [NOBODY KNOWS] Blair McDougall came out with a real peach.
We’re sure that the USA, Russia and China (to name but three off the top of our heads) will be startled and dismayed to learn that they’re no longer “serious” nations. But possibly not quite as surprised as the government of Denmark will be to learn that they’re in a monetary union with France.
The worst apology in the world 75
Earlier this evening the Herald’s poor demented David Leask made an extraordinary and completely untrue allegation:
We haven’t said a single word on the subject (we haven’t a clue if it’s true or not), so several people challenged Leask on the claim, and eventually got a response.
Dear Murray 122
The recent former Daily Record editor and even more recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with a rather audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.
But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.
We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.
Absolute Riddy Of The Day 162
We did a poll, and the people have spoken:
Um, who was actually the UK government in fiscal year 2009/10, lads?