When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.
Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
What Tories are, in two images from one week.
Never forget it until the day you die, readers.
Category
uk politics
This is Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:
But with the greatest respect to Scotland’s pioneering engineers, they’re not the thing we’re reminded of when we hear Scottish Labour talking about the new bridge. This is what we’re reminded of.
Category
comment, scottish politics
The Sunday Times has a breathless account today of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant five-day tour of Scotland.
It sounds like quite the event.
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Tags: and finally
Category
comment, pictures, scottish politics
This site is still hampered by the consequences of TotallyUnbelievableMadnessGate, so until normal service is resumed here’s a quick recap of a few stories from the last few days you may have missed.
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Category
misc, scottish politics
This morning sees the release of another set of GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) figures accompanied, no doubt, by the usual strange hybrid of sneering and cringing from Unionist politicians braying proudly that we’re too small, too subsidised and too stupid to ever look after our own country.
So as the annual circus act gets under way again, for a little perspective we took a quick look at Scotland’s actual standing in the international community.
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Tags: cringe, too wee too poor too stupid
Category
analysis, scottish politics, world
We’ll only be making a very brief comment on the story in Tuesday’s Herald, for hopefully obvious reasons. The piece by Tom Gordon has been written for maximum innuendo to allow the wildest speculations on social media – which are of course duly taking place – but the alleged events relate entirely to some tweets from our Twitter account, none of which have been deleted and all of which are still publicly visible.
Nothing more sinister or serious than some tweets has occurred, or been alleged to have occurred. None of the tweets involved are in ANY way threatening, not even in a joking sense. That’s all we’ll be saying on the subject at this time.
Category
admin, media
With this year’s GERS figures imminent, there are two stories about North Sea oil in today’s papers which are markedly different in both tone and honesty.
This, for example, is the front page of the Sunday Herald:
It’s basically a reprise of a Wings story from almost a year ago, noting that despite producing broadly similar amounts of oil to Scotland from the North Sea, Norway has generated tens of billions in pounds in government revenue from it – even during the price slump of recent years – while Scotland has actually LOST money.
The Sunday Times, though, has a rather different take.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
Number of references to “UK”, “Britain” or “British” in this story about salmon: 17
Number of references to “Scotland” or “Scottish”: 1 (in a quote)
Percentage of “UK” salmon industry that’s actually in Scotland: 96.3%
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Category
scottish politics, stats, uk politics
