Earlier this week we noticed the curious lack of media coverage of the “Devo Nano” report. As the document spelling out Labour’s “more powers” offer to Scotland in the event of a No vote, its release was ostensibly the most important milestone so far in the independence debate, so we found it very strange to see it get such a muted reception, particularly from the Daily Record.
Two days later the explanation arrived, in the form of the so-called “Red Paper”. Described by some journalists as a “mini-manifesto”, it was a 64-page uncosted wishlist of vague feelgood notions like reducing child poverty. (A brave, daring and controversial step there to be sure.) And this time the papers were all over it.
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Tags: Devo Nanosquirrelsvote no get nothing
Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
At this week’s First Minister’s Questions, Johann Lamont banged repeatedly on a drum that the Unionist parties never tire of thrashing like an Orangeman in marching season – the notion that an independent Scotland couldn’t afford to live as it does now and would have to raise taxes or cut public spending.
Over and over again Lamont demanded the First Minister say which he would do if Scotland voted Yes, implying the choice wouldn’t have to be made inside the Union:
“If Scotland were outside the United Kingdom, I ask again: how would the First Minister pay for that loss in revenue—by cutting services or by raising taxes?”
Ms Lamont’s colleague Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is about to embark on a tour of Scotland, flitting from city to town to village like some demonic ghostly apparation out of “Tam O’Shanter”, frightening Scots with blood-chilling tales of “black holes” and, most especially, unaffordable pensions.
Sounds like we better stay in the safety and security of the UK, then.
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Tags: black hole
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analysis, scottish politics, uk politics
The Daily Record’s run a whole clutch of articles of a vaguely positive nature towards independence recently, which is nice. We assume Torcuil Crichton must be ill. But an editorial leader column today commenting on the Yes campaign’s encouraging poll figures and identifying the SNP’s social-justice policy programme as the reason had an intriguing line buried in the middle of it.
“Only Labour can win this battle for the UK and they have to run up a red flag for Scotland and sail under it. If that is a different banner from the rest of the UK, so be it.”
Hang on. What does that mean, exactly?
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Tags: vote no get nothing
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analysis, media, scottish politics
(Now to questions typed by someone with a rudimentary command of written English.)
Because as we know “Better Together” will have quite a lot of trouble coming up with any coherent replies, we’ve had a bash ourselves while we wait for them to get started.
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Tags: and finally
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
It’s a fortunate thing, viewers, that we have a strong will, hardened by years of dreich, endless 1970s Sundays in Scotland with only three channels on the telly (each of them showing programmes entirely about farming and God), everything outside shut except the rainclouds, and nothing to look forward to but school in the morning.
Because otherwise the frustrations of yesterday’s site problems, followed by waking up this morning to be faced with papers stuffed to the brim with miserable, bleating old Scottish Labour dinosaurs with torn coupons and long catalogues of whinges about you-know-who and you-know-what might just have pushed us over the edge.
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Tags: crybabies
Category
comment, scottish politics
Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.
The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.
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comment, culture, disturbing, scum, uk politics
We all know there’s something strange about Britain. Germany and China have their factories, France and Japan their nuclear power plants. America has Google and Apple and the world’s largest navy. But how is it that Britain, a country that closed its mines and shuttered almost its entire manufacturing industry, is still a major world economy?
The answer is Britain’s best-kept economic secret. It links Grangemouth, the obscene cost of housing in London, the Royal Mail sell-off, Channel Island tax havens and George Osborne’s disregard for the poor, and explains why an incomprehensible financial crisis triggered by bad American mortgages led to the closure of municipal libraries and swimming pools across the UK and a programme of permanent austerity.
And more to the point, it explains why only London, not Scotland or Wales or Yorkshire or Wearside, matters to the British political class today.
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Tags: Alistair Davidson
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analysis, uk politics
Alert commuters using Scotland’s railway stations may this week have received a “newspaper” from the official No campaign containing a splendid crossword and a recipe for raspberry brownies, amongst some political rubbish.
We haven’t tried it ourselves, but we hope the recipe was a bit less inaccurate than the political sections, or a lot of people might die of food poisoning.
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Tags: Douglas Daniel
Category
analysis, scottish politics
One of Labour’s key allies in Scotland is solicitor Mike Dailly of the Govan Law Centre. Best known for his attempts to force the Scottish Government to subsidise the bedroom tax by cutting services elsewhere, he’s a venomously anti-SNP figure who rarely passes up the chance for a bit of Nat-bashing.
(It would, we’re sure, be overly cynical to suggest that Mr Dailly wants the bedroom tax propped up because if it was abolished he’d suddenly be out of the public eye.)
Today he’s published a blog angrily contesting the claim made in yesterday’s White Paper that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
We thought we’d take a look.
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analysis, idiots, scottish politics
There’s pretty much nothing about Labour’s latest fearmongering anti-independence leaflet (revealed exclusively by us on Tuesday night) that doesn’t make us facepalm.
The only difficult thing is deciding which aspect is the most idiotic.
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Tags: hypocrisy
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analysis, comment, scottish politics