Kezia Dugdale Fact Check, part 675 166
Posted on
January 27, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Kezia in the Independent yesterday:
The most powerful? Did it just get promoted?
The headline is always a lie 133
Posted on
January 27, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.
It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.
Slow news month 268
Posted on
January 26, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re not saying there isn’t a lot going on at the moment, but today’s Daily Record actually devotes a page to telling women when to change their pants.
Truth and wrongs 284
Posted on
January 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Below is a 17-minute section of this afternoon’s John Beattie show on BBC Radio Scotland, featuring me and an amateur blogger with a keen interest in Pedigree Chum discussing the effect of the lower oil price on the Scottish economy.
(John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 January 2016)
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Happily, by the end of the show everyone on all sides was agreed that the lower oil price will actually benefit the Scottish economy overall, with the positive effects driving growth and outweighing the downside of lower corporation tax receipts.
So that’s genuine progress – next time some frothing Yoon screams “OIL PRICE! BLACK HOLE! SNP LIES! TOO WEE, TOO POOR!” at you, you can direct them here for categorical agreement from the Yes and No sides alike that actually the falling oil price makes an independent Scotland MORE economically viable, not less.
Unfortunately you’ll have to put up with a condescending, patronising arse sniggering randomly throughout, but it’s a relatively small price to pay.
Imagine our surprise 112
Posted on
January 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Referendum day, 18 September 2014:
Let’s hit the fast-forward button again.
Think of another number 167
Posted on
January 24, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Normally when the BBC’s Andrew Neil asks a politician to put a figure on one of their policy proposals the interviewee should be wary, because a trap is about to be sprung.
For some reason that didn’t happen today.
Soapbox: From your tether unwind 333
Posted on
January 23, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Governments, of all political stripes and nations, are often accused of being control freaks bent on constructing and enforcing a “nanny state”, where citizens’ freedoms are arbitrarily curtailed under a pretence of it all being for their own good.
Things from banning smoking and routinely snooping on private emails to forbidding people from wearing certain types of hats or expressing unpopular opinions (or even popular ones simply deemed unacceptable by a self-selecting elite) are justified for all sorts of social and economic reasons.
But where, if anywhere, should the line be drawn?
The Once-In-A-Generation Game 247
Posted on
January 22, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The phrase most repeated by angry Unionists in the 16-and-a-bit months since the independence referendum is surely “once in a generation”. While the SNP quietly gets on with the business of government, having not mentioned a second referendum in its 2015 manifesto and not being expected to do so in this year’s either, the parties of the UK can’t seem to shut up about it.
The Tories in particular seem determined to make “NO SECOND REFERENDUM” the main plank of their 2016 election campaign, despite nobody actually proposing one.
(This is happening despite Ruth Davidson having said just nine months ago that her party wouldn’t block a second indyref, while Ed Miliband said that Labour would. However, Davidson’s organ-grinder, David Cameron, joined Labour in ruling it out just a few months later, which may explain Davidson performing a sudden U-turn akin to her famous one over more devolution.)
And when you boil it down to the brass tacks, what that means is that the parties of the Union want to hold the Scottish people prisoner.
Two impostors just the same 282
Posted on
January 21, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.
But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.
Phew, that was close 162
Posted on
January 20, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Remember the scary old days, readers?
Thankfully, Scotland voted No and pensions were saved forever.
A small discrepancy 180
Posted on
January 19, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Labour Party has today published Margaret Beckett’s report into why it lost the 2015 general election. We were rather struck by this line:
Let’s just go over that one again to be sure: Labour believed that an SNP victory in Scotland would make it “impossible” for the Tories to form the government.
Which is weird, because that’s not quite what we remember them saying.
