The usual suspect 631
Posted on
March 17, 2018 by
Chris Cairns
The greasy poll 357
Posted on
March 15, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A new Scottish Labour propaganda website called The Red Robin attracted some attention at the weekend by claiming that new polling had shown Labour closing the Westminster voting gap on the SNP to just 4 points.
To try to lend some credibility to this rather dubious assertion – the SNP’s average lead is currently around 15 points – it pointed out that the polling company’s owner was the Vice-Chair of the British Polling Council.
Readers would quite reasonably infer from that that Moonlight Research was a BPC member, and BPC rules state that if figures from a poll enter the public domain, the full data tables concerning those figures have to be released within 48 hours so that people can scrutinise them and ensure that the methodology (sample size, weighting, question wording etc) is fully up to scratch and above board.
So since the blog post is now five days old, we dropped Moonlight a line asking if we could see them, and quickly got an interesting reply.
The same as it ever was 44
Posted on
March 15, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Particularly alert readers may have experienced a pang of deja vu at yesterday’s story highlighting media misrepresentation of polling figures.
We can’t imagine why.
The star prize 77
Posted on
March 14, 2018 by
The History Twins
Spinning down 177
Posted on
March 14, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So here’s a headline from the (Dundee) Evening Telegraph.
You know how we’re always pointing out how newspapers love to lie to readers without actually saying things that are untrue? Let’s have a quick case study.
A historic breakthrough 579
Posted on
March 12, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!
At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.
And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.
The Cupid Stunt 412
Posted on
March 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.
And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.
Using the Force 58
Posted on
March 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
The slightly-less-well-known definition of “force” that means “a minority government persuading three out of four opposition parties to agree with it and democratically vote a measure through”, there.
Rocket launched 311
Posted on
March 07, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This was us for most of yesterday:
Because we were genuinely concerned about this year’s fundraiser. It was coming off the back of our lowest traffic month in four years (February was absolutely dead in Scottish politics, and we had almost no internet for the last two weeks of it), and some other indy sites had had badly underachieving crowdfunders in recent months.
So it’s quite the pleasant surprise to be able to say that the total (direct donations as well as through the fundraising page) for the first 24 hours alone was… £72,429.
Let’s Build A Rocket 490
Posted on
March 06, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Our problems and how to solve them 357
Posted on
March 05, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As the winter Scottish political news drought enters its 17th week, mainstream and alternative media commentators alike are scratching around desperately for anything to write about, which tends to end up in overlong reflective and/or hectoring essays about how to secure independence, invariably concluding that what we need is for everyone in Scotland to start thinking and acting exactly like the author of the article.
We’re going to aim for something a bit shorter and more practical, at least.
