A story on the BBC website last night:
The same story this morning:
The first version is entirely accurate. Readers can decide for themselves why someone at the BBC felt it needed to be changed from neutral terms to pejorative ones.
The Conservative Home website ran this yesterday.
Alert readers, of course, will be able to explain at least one Scottish teaching vacancy.
We thought, since it’s Friday, you might like a really good laugh.
If you’re wondering if the “anti-establishment” Anas Sarwar is the same one who was privately educated at a £10,000-a-year grammar school, a hereditary millionaire who has also made his children millionaires while one of them is still in nappies, is privately educating the others, who had a Westminster seat handed down to him by his father but then lost it at the first opportunity, and who is now a Holyrood MSP without a single person in Scotland actually voting for him (having previously derided the Parliament as “undemocratic”), we can confirm that yes, it is.
It’s no easy task picking the dimmest of the new intake of Unionist M/SPs. Competition is stiff, what with the likes of Jamie Greene (Con), Dean Lockhart (Con), Jamie Greene (Con), Christine Jardine (Lib), Jamie Greene (Con) and Paul Sweeney (Lab) all putting up a strong showing on a regular basis.
But we have a new(ish) contender for the crown.
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.
But it gets worse.
This was Jamie Ross of Buzzfeed at the SNP conference yesterday.
But not everyone was having the same experience.
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.
We’ll be keeping this post updated throughout the day with news as it comes in.
Remember as you look at these images: this is a modern European state reacting to an entirely peaceful democratic movement and process in 2017.
What’s going on in Catalonia today:
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
It’s 4-5 years until Chairman Murray returns from the UN…” Jul 11, 17:04
