Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.
Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:
“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”
Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.
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Tags: flat-out lies, Some Arsehole news
Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics, uk politics
In the last few days we’ve been talking a lot about the bizarre perversion of arithmetic that now seems to dominate political campaigning in the UK, and which has the media so tied in knots that the poor Telegraph now thinks nothing of saying the SNP gained council seats, lost them and gained them again in the space of four paragraphs.
But numbers are confusing and we’re very hungry at the moment after some major dental surgery made eating difficult, so we weren’t really paying attention until Ruth Davidson started talking about pies.
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Category
analysis, scottish politics
Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.
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Tags: arithmetic fail, misinformation
Category
analysis, debunks, media, scottish politics
The BBC has just published an article explaining its controversial claim that the SNP actually lost seats at last week’s council elections, despite going from 425 to 431. The analysis was carried out by Prof. David Denver of Lancaster University, and we’d asked him about it yesterday.
He’d very kindly sent us a copy of the same article he’d sent the Beeb. We attach it below. We’ve highlighted in bold the only bits that didn’t make it into the BBC piece.
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
This one definitely looks dodgy.
We, um… we don’t think they DID show that, Kez.
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Tags: flat-out lies, misinformation
Category
comment, debunks, scottish politics, stats
Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this.
Because we’ve been telling you it was coming for half a decade.
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Category
comment, culture, disturbing, history, scottish politics
When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.
So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?
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Tags: and finally, flat-out lies
Category
analysis, idiots, scottish politics, stats
It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.
Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
Some manner of strange, alien vortex swallowed the very concept of arithmetic as we know it earlier this evening. The answer to the question “what is 431 minus 425?” was variously reported by the media as -7, -14, +31 and -30, with nowhere that we could find offering the seemingly obvious answer of “6”. But that was only the beginning.
Because language wasn’t immune from the sudden redefinitions either. The Tories, who finished 155 seats behind the SNP, nevertheless proclaimed themselves not only the winners of the election, but the sole winners.
So let’s have a quick review of the facts.
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
With all 32 councils now having declared, the Scottish local elections are over and the SNP have won again, taking 431 seats. Last time round in 2012 they took 425.
You might think you know the difference between 431 and 425. But you don’t.
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Tags: arithmetic fail
Category
analysis, comment, debunks, media, scottish politics, video, wtf
