Kez’s Nightmare 236
Posted on
September 24, 2016 by
Chris Cairns
The squandered bounty 434
Posted on
September 22, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s long been a bone of contention for Scots – and not just nationalists – that the UK government, by common agreement, wasted the vast wealth windfall of the North Sea on funding Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s programme of deliberate de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and bribes to the working class in the form of Right To Buy.
It did so rather than investing the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund, as demanded by the SNP (and some elements of Labour) and practiced in Norway, whose fund – only set up in 1990 – is now a literal embarrassment of riches.
But the reality is even worse than that. Because according to a 2015 report by the National Resource Governance Institute that’s just come to our attention, the truth is that if the UK had managed its North Sea treasure better, it could have done both.
The soggy deckchairs 214
Posted on
September 21, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
With the greatest of reluctance, and only in the absence of anything even remotely more interesting, then, let’s have a few words on Scottish Labour’s latest solemn and sincere declaration of its full, total, complete and utter autonomy.
Because while the media is reporting the development that UK Labour has decided to extend a few extra inches of lead to Kezia Dugdale’s branch office as if it had the slightest importance to anything, it seems oddly reluctant to ask the obvious question.
Moving on 566
Posted on
September 19, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:
It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?
The unhappy 11% 299
Posted on
September 18, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Sunday Times has a new Panelbase poll out today, and it borrows a question that was first asked by this website (via the same pollster) 14 months ago. These were the results this month:
They broadly show little change from when we asked last year (for the five options the changes are +1, 0, -3, +8 and -5), suggesting that the main practical upshot of the EU referendum campaign was to halve the number of Don’t Knows, which was achieved by shifting almost all of them straight onto the Leave side with the Remain camp’s abysmal recreation of Better Together’s “Project Fear”.
Nevertheless, the chart is a fascinating and pertinent one. Because while there’s only one of the four non-DK groups in the list who definitely can’t get what they want, there’s another one whose decision will be a lot harder than Yes supporters would like.
Following the trail 287
Posted on
September 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Ruth Davidson opened First Minister’s Questions yesterday with an attack on the Scottish Government over the performance of the NHS, citing a report that the service faced “pockets of meltdown” this winter.
But later in the session, alert backbench SNP MSP Clare Haughey claimed that the report being quoted by the Tory leader had only in fact examined THREE Scottish hospitals. So we thought we’d better check.
Dissatisfaction guaranteed 323
Posted on
September 15, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.
But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.
Heads they win, tails you lose 283
Posted on
September 14, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve been poring over the fascinating document released yesterday by the Fraser Of Allander Institute, examining in detail the prospects for the Scottish Government’s budget in the coming years.
Admittedly at first we were chiefly doing it in order to embarrass the increasingly angry and belligerent BBC presenter Andrew Neil, who insisted repeatedly last year that there’d been no real-terms cut to the Holyrood budget since the Tories came to power.
That claim put Neil at odds with all manner of people pointing out that the opposite was true, to which we can now add the FoAI:
But we already knew Andrew Neil was an idiot, so that was no big deal. It was another chart in the document that caught our eye and made us think.
Notice of rule change 267
Posted on
September 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Sorry, guys 259
Posted on
September 12, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
What you can’t say 293
Posted on
September 12, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As several alert readers have already spotted, our Twitter account was suspended at some point in the early hours of this morning. We’ve had no email from Twitter offering any sort of explanation, but it seems most likely to have been at the behest of a Daily Express hack called Siobhan McFadyen who’s been huffily bleating to the company’s executives over the weekend about this tweet:
The reason we tweeted that comment is detailed here and here. But apparently it’s an opinion that you’re no longer allowed to have.
