Blazing and addled 156
Posted on
June 09, 2018 by
Chris Cairns
The magnifier 75
Posted on
June 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.
The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.
Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.
Times of change 139
Posted on
June 07, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Some new data from the long-running Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was released tonight, and it makes for fascinating reading.
The headline stat is that for only the second year in the 18 years the study has been running, independence is the most popular option for the governance of Scotland:
This doesn’t, however, mean that it’s the majority view, because while independence is backed by 45% the “No” option is split into two – support for devolution (41%) and those ultra-Yoons who want Holyrood abolished (8%).
Now, considering that as recently as 2012 those figures were independence on 23%, devolution 61% and no Parliament 13%, that’s still a remarkable shift in Scottish public opinion in a very short space of time – support for indy has DOUBLED in five years while devolution has dropped by a third.
And indeed, when the survey asked a straight Yes/No question the results came out even closer, at 48% Yes to 52% No – a 3% swing to Yes from the 2016 figures.
No wonder the Unionists are extra-twitchy lately.
Logic in reverse 134
Posted on
June 07, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re having a lot of trouble with this one, to be honest.
The Record, along with Scottish Labour and a lot of the left of social media, are up in arms that a mystery benefactor has donated a £230,000 Rolls Royce to Glasgow City Council for the use of the Lord Provost. But nobody can quite manage to explain why they’re so angry about it.
That Went Well Department 207
Posted on
June 05, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
November 2009: “at the end of the day the banks will be paying money to the British people and not the other way round”.
Shall we take a look through the arched-eyebrows window, readers?
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough 74
Posted on
June 05, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ll shortly round up the last pieces of data from our Panelbase poll of English voters last month, but this one merits singling out, we think.
Wait, what?
A whiff of something fishy 297
Posted on
June 02, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.
Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.
But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.
Walking like a peasant 136
Posted on
June 01, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So this story is the front page of tonight’s Evening Times.
It’s a pretty slim piece deploying a Glasgow mother to attack the SNP-run city council over a recent increase in nursery fees, and it sounds like the new higher cost might be a pretty big deal to her.
Anatomy of an embarrassment 186
Posted on
May 31, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
And no, we don’t even mean the FOUR spelling mistakes in this 42-word tweet.
We mean the bit that we’ve highlighted above in blue. Because what Scottish Labour’s lowest-watt bulb was gloating about earlier today was that Lord Bracadale concluded there’d been no gap created in the law by the Kelly-driven abolition of the OBFA.
And that’s… well, that’s not quite what Lord Bracadale said.
Being silenced is golden 80
Posted on
May 31, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The findings of Lord Bracadale’s report into hate-crime law in Scotland were published today (tl;dr version: OBFA’s coming back), and we couldn’t help observing them in the context of an interesting Guardian article on the alt/far right yesterday.
Because we’ve discovered something slightly odd about the subject.
The Too Wee Club Redux 157
Posted on
May 30, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Returning to a theme.
(Original series here.)
