The above story is feeble enough as it stands, even allowing for it being a desperately slow news week for Scottish politics. Maureen Watt is 66 years old and has asthma, and making a pensioner with breathing difficulties sprint a mile to get to a speech on time probably isn’t the most cost-effective way for the Parliament to save four and a half quid, once you’ve factored in the cost of the ambulance and everything.
Sometimes it’s hard for Yes supporters in Scotland not to be a bit jealous of Catalonia.
Despite their would-be nation being only a little bit bigger than Scotland, and despite being faced with very real physical and legal intimidation, the Catalan independence movement regularly manages to put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.
Yes marches and rallies in Scotland, by comparison, often struggle to get attendances numbered in the hundreds, largely because squabbling factions refuse to get along with each other and by far the biggest entity in the Yes movement – the SNP – wants nothing to do with them.
Marches don’t win independence, of course. But what does?
We referenced this a few days ago because we definitely remembered it happening, but we’d been unable to actually locate the evidence, and at Wings Over Scotland that sort of thing bothers us. After a very considerable amount of effort we’ve now tracked it down, so we’re bunging it up here to preserve it for the record.
(At that point host Frank Skinner gave up and moved on.)
It’s from one month after the indyref, and the interesting thing is that Robinson is twice given the opportunity to respond to Skinner’s question about whether he thought that the pro-Yes supporters had any sort of fair point about his alleged bias, and both times – rather than, say, just dismissing it with a quick “Of course not” – he ducks it.
Readers can, as always, make their own judgements.
Amid the horror of events in Catalonia yesterday, the Prime Minister of the UK – quite unintentionally – said something during an interview on the Andrew Marr Show which was highly pertinent not only to the Catalan referendum but to British domestic politics too. We thought it needed saving for the record.
This site can’t claim to know enough about Spanish and Catalan politics to have an opinion about whether independence for Catalonia is a good idea or not. All we can say is that democracy is a good idea, and the draconian and extreme attempts of the Spanish government to suppress the referendum – ludicrously under-reported in the UK media, particularly broadcast media – are a terrifying throwback to its fascist past. We very much hope they don’t succeed.
