The art of the filibuster 249
This is what a man who REALLY doesn’t want to answer a question looks like.
This is what a man who REALLY doesn’t want to answer a question looks like.
As we noted on Tuesday, Scottish Labour’s opening election salvo for 2016 has been to blame the Scottish Government for unaffordable house prices.
Of the 450 most obvious flaws in that argument, not least the extraordinary efforts a 13-year Labour government went to to keep the housing bubble inflated, the one that caught our eye was that in the past three years we were regularly told of one thing that definitely WOULD bring prices down dramatically, but which Labour pathologically fought every step of the way.
(And the rest of the “pro-indy left”.)
If you’re primarily or solely contesting regional seats, and you’re chiefly (as seems to be the case) targeting people who are going to use their first vote for the SNP, “Vote for us so that we can provide strong opposition to the SNP” is a pretty weird pitch.
You’re basically asking people to use their second vote to cancel out their first. And that’s quite a tough angle to be trying to sell them. Just saying, like.
We suppose we shouldn’t technically be surprised that today’s newspapers carry no analysis whatsoever of Kezia Dugdale’s big speech yesterday detailing Scottish Labour’s first big election pledge – a £6000 handout to first-time home buyers.
After all, current polling suggests Scottish Labour have about as much chance of exerting any influence in the next Scottish Parliament as Lemmy has of posthumously winning the Eurovision Song Contest, so it doesn’t really matter if Kezia Dugdale promises every voter a free unicorn made of diamonds and glitter.
Still, if only for the mental exercise, it’s worth taking a look in detail.
The tweets below are all genuine, and taken from the Scottish Labour Twitter account earlier today during its live-tweeting of Kezia Dugdale’s speech. We’ve rarely heard a more compelling and concise argument for a Yes vote. We take our hats off to her.
It’s always good to see someone take a strong moral stand.
When indeed, eh?
So, this appeared in the Herald today:
And that’s a problem, because it’s a complete and utter lie.
As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.
In more senses than one.
The Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter has had some wise words to say on the subject of social media in the past few weeks, most recently on New Year’s Day:
The month before, though, he’d been even more to the point.
We tweeted this proposition last night (the quote comes from a blog post yesterday by Scottish Labour madcase and all-round comedy relief Ian Smart):
We thought you might enjoy some of the responses as much as we did.
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Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.