Blood and soil socialism 260
From Kezia Dugdale’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference yesterday:
So hang on – only people born in Scotland are “Scottish”? Bit controversial. But then again, given Scottish Labour’s constant pejorative use of the word “foreigner” in recent years, we probably shouldn’t be shocked.
Funny how things come around 179
From a BBC report on the 2004 Scottish Labour conference:
And to give the former First Minister his due, he wasn’t wrong.
The new middle 284
The Scottish Daily Mail has been working itself into a froth this week over the idea that the Scottish Government doesn’t intend to match George Osborne’s increase in the upper-rate income tax threshold from £42,000 to £45,000.
Central to the complaint is that rejecting the increase will hurt what the Mail calls “the squeezed middle” and “middle earners”, including “nurses, teachers and police”.
There are, of course, several ways of defining “middle”.
With a straight face 296
Here’s a tweet from Fraser Nelson of the Spectator this morning:
Now, we already know that’s complete drivel for at least five reasons. But it’s not the maddest thing about the point Nelson’s trying to make.
All you need to know about the budget 156
The short farewell 122
We thought quite a lot of you would probably like to see this:
The murder of words 140
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
Double and nothing 233
We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.
But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:
Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.
(Which is lucky, as they’re going to do it with money that doesn’t exist.)
They want to run the economy, folks. And there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland prepared to vote for them. We live in zany times.
Welfare for the wealthy 180
There are two very different kinds of welfare in the UK. One is the kind that primarily benefits poor people, which is under remorseless attack from the government.
But there’s another kind too, for which there’s still a bottomless pit of cash.
The technical plural 109
A significant groundswell of opinion, perhaps:
Oddly, the Scotsman’s report on the story contains not a single further piece of data about how numerous these opponents of a second referendum are.

























