Alert contributor Calum Ferguson tells us the first bookie to come out with odds for the 2016 Holyrood election is Ladbrokes. Fortune-making opportunities seem limited.
(Click pic to enlarge.)
An alert reader brought our attention today to a Daily Record article that we’d missed on Friday, reporting how a Glasgow student had launched a petition bitterly attacking the Scottish Government over cuts to college places.
Despite having attracted only 500 signatures (and only 400 more in the following five days despite the Record helpfully linking to it), the petition was deemed newsworthy enough for a hefty polemic in which petition author Eunis Jassemi pulled no punches, repeatedly lashing the SNP in highly political terms. No counterquote was offered.
Mr Jassemi was described by the Record in the piece as a “business student” and a “former Hutcheson’s Grammar School pupil”, but we can only assume that they must have run out of room before they got to a rather more pertinent item on his CV.
David Cameron, 16 September 2014 and 8 May 2015 respectively:
You get how it works now, right?
Last night we highlighted the reaction from various right-wing columnists to the SNP’s torpedoing yesterday of Tory attempts to relax the laws on foxhunting in England and Wales. Today the same commentariat has turned its rage to thoughts of revenge, in the form of “English votes for English laws”.
And we’re confused, because we don’t know what this “England” they speak of is.
It seems safe to say that the SNP’s de facto defeat of the fox-torturing lobby today has riled the right-wing commentariat beyond their endurance. Unable to get their way and inflict a prolonged, agonising death on small animals for “sport”, Tory columnists have instead descended howling and bloodthirsty at pack strength on their readers.
Here’s just a small sample.
As part of their tireless campaign against abuse and threats on the internet, the Mail’s ever-alert reporters will doubtless be wanting to run a major piece on the deputy leader of UKIP calling today on a widely-read website for Nicola Sturgeon to be killed.
No need to thank us for the tip-off, guys. All part of the service.
There’s little to gladden the heart of a left-wing Scot like a Tory squealing in outrage that he won’t be allowed to torture woodland creatures to death for “sport” any more.
So this site is thrilled by the announcement from the SNP that they will, after much speculation in the media, vote against (and therefore likely condemn to defeat) the UK government’s plans to relax England’s fox-hunting ban to a point at which it would be de facto repealed entirely.
And not just because foxes are a lot cuter than Tories.
The Scottish Daily Mail today leads with a screaming banner headline announcing in its trademark style that, according to a poll it commissioned with Survation, Scots are massively opposed to any income tax rises when Holyrood eventually gets power over the rates under the new Scotland Bill.
And the reason that’s weird is that we commissioned a poll on the very same thing just days before, and got a dramatically different answer.
Yesterday we listed some of the nastier items from George Osborne’s horrifying 2015 budget that Labour had said they wouldn’t be opposing, including the public-sector payrise freeze, the reduction in the benefit cap and the slashing of child tax credit for families with more than two children.
On a BBC hustings debate today, Yvette Cooper extended the list.
Our latest Panelbase poll was conducted from 26 June-3 July, before this weekend’s astonishing events involving Greece, which are currently being documented on Twitter under the hashtag #ThisIsACoup.
We’re going to ask the exact same question again in our next one, so we can see if the EU’s actions have caused any significant change in public opinion. It should be pretty interesting either way.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
