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Fingers jammed in ears 105

Posted on September 10, 2013 by

Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.

fingerears

We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.

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Honesty boxing 55

Posted on September 09, 2013 by

Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?

homebakes

It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.

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The size of the task 158

Posted on September 09, 2013 by

Yesterday we ran a couple of features examining the sort of people the Yes campaign needs to convince if it’s to win the referendum in just over a year’s time, and how it might go about tackling that job. Today saw the release of a series of polls from Tory peer Lord Ashcroft that demonstrate just how big a challenge that’s going to present.

mountain

Because it’s not that the results show an electorate deeply committed to the Union (although they do suggest a large No majority, albeit from polling which was conducted as much as almost seven months ago), but because they illustrate just how little voters currently know about anything.

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What women don’t want 169

Posted on August 19, 2013 by

Forgive us another rummage around in our poll data, but we didn’t do a lot of study into gender differences in our first wave of analysis, and we were struck by something this morning as we idly browsed through the question about what Scots were scared of.

fearwoman

Along with the fact that women were almost twice as likely – 38% to 22% – to be undecided about their referendum vote* as men (and indeed about most other votes), it was one of the areas where the differences between the sexes were most stark.

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Quoted for truth #28 58

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:

“Labour’s senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.

Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing.

It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”

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Talent borrows, genius steals 90

Posted on August 09, 2013 by

Viewers who are still awake after all today’s excitement will doubtless recall an article from this morning in which we reported the fact that hapless “Better Together” director Blair McDougall had issued an extraordinary petted-lip complaint about the Yes camp daring to use the phrase “best of both worlds”, as if it was copyrighted.

copy

(The even more remarkable news being that the Scotsman considered this a story.)

Still, it’s a fair point, right? You shouldn’t just pinch stuff from people, should you?

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Now with added fear 69

Posted on August 07, 2013 by

Ooh, we haven’t had one of these for a while. Browsing the newspapers on our iPad this morning before getting up, we noticed an interesting headline in the Scotsman.

scotsmancuts

Intrigued, we clicked on it to see if it was a standard-issue scare story in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section, and were pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t. In fact, the warned-of tax rises or cuts in services were those which would follow a No vote in the referendum, as they’re those planned by UK Chancellor George Osborne.

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Won’t somebody think of the children? 53

Posted on August 04, 2013 by

One of the benefits, if that’s the right word, of the Daily Record’s shambolic new iPad app is that the 30-day trial period means we got to see a print copy of the Sunday Mail today for the first time in years. It was largely like a parochial edition of Heat magazine (“FAT LASS DATES THIN BLOKE” got a spread), but buried 40-odd pages in was a “special report” that doesn’t seem to have made it onto the paper’s website.

mailthumb

The Mail accompanies the report with an editorial entitled “We must not abandon our Geordie pals”, which is very carefully worded in order to give the impression that a Yes vote would be to do just that, without actually saying so. But the actual content of the report is curiously at odds with the headlines.

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Two cousins 36

Posted on July 31, 2013 by

The internet’s been enjoying itself since last night knocking up satirical versions of The Sun’s wraparound cover today. For no immediately apparent reason (except perhaps that it’s a slow time for news) the paper has suddenly decided to give a “State Of The Union”-type address explicitly setting out its beliefs on a variety of subjects.

suncovers1

We thought that it might pass a few idle moments to compare the UK and Scottish editions, and see how closely those beliefs matched up on either side of the border.

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Behind open doors 78

Posted on July 26, 2013 by

As we noted earlier, the Wings Over Scotland spy at last night’s “Better Together” meeting in our home town of Bathgate last night wasn’t alone. Some intrepid readers also attended the event, and recorded the whole thing to find out what the No campaign are telling people away from the scrutiny of the media.

It’s a grim watch, but we’ve picked you out some highlights.

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Differently tabled 46

Posted on July 07, 2013 by

In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

wheeltennis

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

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No camp enlists new allies 108

Posted on June 20, 2013 by

We’ve noted a few times on this site that if you can judge a person by the company they keep, then the “Better Together” campaign would be an unsavoury character indeed. Backed enthusiastically by the likes of UKIP, the EDL/SDL, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order, it must be an uncomfortable place for Lib Dems and self-professed “internationalist socialists” within Labour to be living.

invicta

By contrast, the blackest sheep in the Yes family are a tiny handful of anonymous internet McGlashan sorts, daft and sometimes shouty but plainly harmless. We can’t recall any examples of Yes supporters being caught out giving Nazi salutes or calling for the forced repatriation of immigrants or the murder of Catholics, and you can be sure if there were any they’d have been all over every newspaper in the land.

So there’s a degree of irony in the newest recruit to the Unionist cause.

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