This week, as the UK’s new Conservative government brought forward a bill to impose tax on renewable energy projects, just seven Labour MPs turned up to oppose it.
You know these guys that you used to see wandering round the city centre with a sandwich board telling us “THE END IS NIGH”? It seems they were right.
Since Germany decided to punish Greece for daring to try to exercise democracy and national sovereignty, there’s been something of an upsurge in commentators on the British left questioning whether the EU is really the progressive institution they’d assumed it to be, leaving their vote in 2017’s EU referendum potentially up for grabs.
(Unlike Scotland, of course, at least Greece didn’t have to ask permission to hold its plebiscite on austerity, even if it appears to have counted for nothing in the end.)
Coming hot on the heels of the European Parliament ignoring concerns over the highly secretive TTIP negotiations, the European dream is turning into a nightmare for many.
We’re still trying to get our heads round this:
The article in question, which we posted last night regarding the former Parliamentary Assistant to Scottish Labour deputy leader hopeful Richard Baker who’s just defected to the Tories, was entirely comprised of some of Stephen Anderson’s own tweets.
It carried no editorial commentary on them whatsoever, and none of the tweets had (of course) been doctored in any way, so the only way the piece could have been “filled with inaccuracies” would have been if the tweets themselves were drivel.
We wish Ruth Davidson the best of luck with her new recruit.
Last night we ran a piece about a story in last week’s Daily Record in which a Scottish Labour official was given free rein to make an extended political attack on the SNP in the guise of a “business student” from the University of the West of Scotland, without his Labour identity being revealed, on the flimsy basis of a petition about college cuts with a few hundred signatures.
As it happens, another UWS student also has a petition doing the rounds at the moment. But it got treated rather differently by the Scottish press.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
