Time catches up with us all 342
Posted on
January 29, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Call the experts 850
Posted on
January 26, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Because when you really want people with their finger on the pulse of Scottish politics to analyse the implications of the Supreme Court decision on Brexit, where else would you go but to Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff, to hear from um, former rugby league star and haircut pioneer Martin Offiah?
The simpler version 292
Posted on
January 26, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Way back in October last year we analysed what now seems to have become the key plank of Unionist argument against independence in the wake of Brexit – the idea that because Scotland does more trade with the rest of the UK than it does with the EU, independence would be economic suicide because Scotland would be sacrificing “the UK single market” (a thing that doesn’t actually exist ) for a much smaller one.
It’s a completely idiotic position, but to be honest we didn’t do a very good job of boiling the counter-argument down to something snappy and quoteable, so let’s have another go and see if we can manage something a little better.
While the truth gets its boots on 367
Posted on
January 25, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Alex Salmond on last night’s Newsnight:
Let’s just quickly fact-check that claim.
Fooled you again 564
Posted on
January 24, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With their bombs and their guns 282
Posted on
January 23, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We followed with interest an exchange over the weekend between Times columnist Kenny Farquharson and the anti-Brexit QC Jolyon Maugham, regarding the difference between the UK government’s insistence that there won’t be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because of the UK leaving the EU, and its continued insistence that there WOULD have to be one between the rUK and an independent Scotland, despite the legal circumstances being indistinguishable.
Farquharson, who like much of the Scottish political commentariat clings doggedly to the implausible dream of a “federal” UK, was adamant that the rules would – and indeed that they should – be different for the two ostensibly identical situations, and his given reason was a deeply disturbing one.
Kenny, it seems, thinks Scottish nationalists should do a lot more murdering.
The Template 233
Posted on
January 22, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Actual Scottish politics news continues to be thinner on the ground than the crowds at a Donald Trump inauguration, so we sympathise once more with the gentle souls of the Scottish press as they endeavour to fill empty pages without doing anything more journalistically strenuous than slightly rewording a Labour or Tory press release.
Fortunately for us, of course, we’ve always got their dismal efforts to talk about.
We need to talk about the oil 255
Posted on
January 21, 2017 by
Alan Brown
The link between the rise of modern Scottish nationalism and the production of North Sea oil is pretty indisputable. Both took off in the early seventies, with that decade’s campaigns powered by the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil” and it’s still a given in media circles that the desirability or even the feasibility of Scottish self-government depends principally on the spot price of Brent crude.
I’ve always found that argument a bizarre one, firstly because it takes no account of people’s emotional attachments to either the UK or Scotland, and secondly because as this site has repeatedly pointed out Scotland is both a producer and consumer of hydrocarbon fuels, so low or high prices are neither an unalloyed good or an unalloyed bad thing for her citizens.
What is incontestable is that the revenue from 45 years of North Sea production has not been well managed by the United Kingdom in comparison to the other states who have benefited from this bounty.
So far so uncontentious.
Outside of constitutional questions, party politics in Scotland revolves around health, education and jobs, with every party more or less in favour of all three. But what if there was an existential threat not just to this trinity but to our entire way of life? Where would that fit in to our politics?
The next pages of the script 203
Posted on
January 20, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s morning in America, readers.
Judge Dredd: Origins was published in 2007, although in fact the basic story of how Bad Bob Booth became the last President of the USA and what he did next was established right back at the 1970s beginnings of Dredd’s parent comic 2000AD.
We actually have a theory that it’s all the Lib Dems’ fault.
The new lie 712
Posted on
January 18, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers may recall as far back as July of last year, when we highlighted an odd thing that Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale had started saying.
Regardless of the fact that it was total hooey, Dugdale repeated it every chance she got, and the inevitable Scottish-media consequences have duly followed.
The competition 158
Posted on
January 17, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.
We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.
We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.
A useful reminder 244
Posted on
January 17, 2017 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Every day from now until indyref 2.
