Walking the dog 90
Posted on
October 31, 2015 by
Chris Cairns
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
The sunshine of socialism 162
Posted on
October 30, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re big fans of socialism ourselves, so when a number of delegates at the Scottish Labour conference today, including UK leader Jeremy Corbyn, revived an old Keir Hardie line we were quite excited.
We just thought it’d be more fun than this.
Let’s clear something up 153
Posted on
October 30, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Asking the question is the easy bit: “If the all-new, super-autonomous Scottish Labour decides to oppose the renewal of Trident, and UK Labour continues to support it, which way do Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster vote on it?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, was a lot more difficult to ascertain.
The missing paragraph 136
Posted on
October 30, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:
Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.
Why we love Twitter 408
Posted on
October 29, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Daily Mail this morning:
“We’re not like the SNP. This isn’t a party of robots that are given a chip and told what to think.”
Twitter’s response is below.
The wishful believers 417
Posted on
October 28, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.
The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.
“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.
But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.
The sides line up 168
Posted on
October 27, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve had no answer from the BBC’s Andrew Neil to the question we asked him at the weekend. There has, however, been an interesting development in the debate over whether there have been severe real-terms cuts to the Scottish Government’s budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.
The extremely highly-respected economic analysts Jim and Margaret Cuthbert (the former of whom was Chief Statistician for the Scotland Office) have today written an article for Bella Caledonia seeking to establish the truth of the argument between Mr Neil and ourselves. Their conclusions are expert, detailed and very clear.
Words without meanings 114
Posted on
October 27, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Labour put out a press release yesterday a few hours before the tax credits fiasco. It concerned the much-ballyhooed new arrangements for Scottish Labour “autonomy”, of exactly the sort that the branch office has been telling us it already had ever since the election of Johann Lamont as leader in 2011.
We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.
The Abstainers Ride Again 140
Posted on
October 26, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Kezia Dugdale Fact Check, part 674 169
Posted on
October 26, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Daily Record:
This one is, in fairness, mostly true. Technically. Sort of. Well, not really.
A question for Andrew Neil 175
Posted on
October 25, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers who follow our Twitter account, like all sensible people do, may have noticed we’ve had a few exchanges with the BBC presenter Andrew Neil since we published a couple of articles about his interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson on The Sunday Politics last week.
The debate centred around a claim Neil put to Robertson:
“You go on and on, your party, about ‘austerity, austerity’ – how much has the Scottish Government budget been cut in the past five or six years? […] In real terms there’s been no cut.“
It seems fair to say the matter’s been in some dispute since then.
