The wheels come off 95
Posted on
March 19, 2016 by
Chris Cairns
The new middle 284
Posted on
March 18, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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
Posted on
March 17, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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
Posted on
March 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
…but were probably genuinely afraid to ask.
Tories, there. Thank goodness we’re better together, eh readers?
The short farewell 122
Posted on
March 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We thought quite a lot of you would probably like to see this:
The murder of words 140
Posted on
March 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
Double and nothing 233
Posted on
March 15, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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
Posted on
March 14, 2016 by
Russell Bruce
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
Posted on
March 14, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Louder than lovebombs 171
Posted on
March 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:
“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
The five key facts about GERS 216
Posted on
March 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
[EDIT 24 August 2016: This article has now been updated here.]
It’s Sunday, so there is of course one last convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles in all the papers, as every Unionist hack and pundit in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.
Everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how Scottish revenue this year being 1% lower than it was last year has comprehensively demolished a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.
So before everyone moves on to a new “SCOTLAND BAD” next week, we thought it was worth a short recap of what we’ve learned about a devolved Scotland’s financial books this week.
Because for all the complex arguments, mad comedy graphs ludicrously pretending that Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and bewildering arrays of incomprehensible stats, there are only five things you really need to know about GERS.
The infallible OBR 167
Posted on
March 12, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Bottom story from today’s Financial Times, less than four months after the top one:
A forecast turned out wrong? Must be the SNP’s fault somehow.
