Thoughts on the latest Ashcroft polls 144
Posted on
April 17, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Careful now.
(Polls here.)
Irrelevant man muddles up dates 129
Posted on
April 17, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
“Scottish Labour” apparently launched its election “manifesto” somewhere in Scotland today. The “leader” of the fringe “party”, Jon Murnaghan or something, seemingly got a bit confused and made a number of pledges regarding devolved issues over which the Westminster government to be elected next month will have no control whatsoever, and would properly belong in a manifesto for the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.
Mr Morley or whatever his name is, who – assuming he wins his own seat – will be an insignificant backbench MP in the event of Ed Miliband’s Labour party winning the election, also said a bunch of other stuff about the SNP being “bad” because they refused to tell him what would be in their 2016 manifesto, further supporting the idea that the agitated branch official had lost track of what year it was.
Buried in paragraph 11 103
Posted on
April 17, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
…of a story in the Scottish Sun today is something rather important.
Those are the words of David Cameron as he launched the Scottish Tories’ manifesto in front of a heavily-vetted invited audience in Glasgow yesterday. They make the pages of a couple of other papers, including the Guardian (which hides them even further down the page than the Sun does), but it’s only the Herald that picks up on their significance, leading its article with the unequivocal lines:
And that’s weird, because it’s actually pretty big news.
Probably not a robbery 67
Posted on
April 17, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?
Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?
The winners and the losers 219
Posted on
April 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Building on sand 144
Posted on
April 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last night’s juxtaposition of somewhat contradictory front covers on the Herald and Scottish Daily Mail was modestly amusing, but nothing new. We pointed out weeks ago that papers on both the left and the right were – often on the same days – painting the SNP as hand-in-glove allies of either Labour or the Tories according to whatever suited their own agendas, and nothing’s changed in that respect.
But it’s interesting to take a look behind the headlines of the respective stories and see the degree to which the truth can be bent, exaggerated or in some cases simply made up from thin air.
An eye-witness account 111
Posted on
April 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Sorry about this, readers. We know that YOU already know that the biggest party in a hung parliament has no special privileges when it comes to forming the government, but since those truth-dodging scamps Scottish Labour still won’t stop saying it (see below), we do still need to keep collating the evidence proving it’s a lie.
The bald-eagle-looking chap toting the cerise tie in this clip of this morning’s Victoria Derbyshire show on the BBC News channel is Lord (Andrew) Adonis, a former Labour government minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
He also wrote the book “Five Days In May” about the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, despite having won almost 50 fewer seats than the Conservatives in that election. So he understands the process.
Lord Adonis does, in fairness, make a brief and half-hearted attempt at punting Jim Murphy’s “1924” line, but in the end he’s forced to concede (nudged along by Peter Riddell of the Institute for Government) that in fact the second-placed party forming the government is perfectly possible.
The Untouchables 109
Posted on
April 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
How long do you think the papers can keep pretending that all the other papers don’t exist, or that we don’t see any of them, folks?
The stench of desperation 162
Posted on
April 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
…hangs heavy about Scottish Labour. In an extraordinary piece on the STV website, the party today appeared to downgrade its bold assertion of just a few months ago that it could hold all 41 seats it won in Scotland in 2010, and perhaps win even more, to simply getting more than the SNP.
But the most remarkable thing happened at the end.
That, readers, is quite the admission. That’s a party which has utterly dominated UK politics in Scotland for six decades openly acknowledging that its entire campaign in the last three weeks will be based on railing against a complete fantasy.
The Armageddon Risk 206
Posted on
April 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The BBC’s Robert Peston on yesterday’s Today programme. (About 2h 37m in.)
(Today, BBC Radio 4, 14 April 2015)
.
Thank heavens that nice Mr Miliband’s going to stand up for austerity, eh?
That’ll be yer Vow, then 117
Posted on
April 15, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Daily Record gets up high on its outrage horse this morning with a front-page story titled “Double-crossed on devo”, echoing Jim Murphy’s claim of yesterday that the Tories’ manifesto pledge on “English votes for English laws” is a “betrayal” of the “Vow” signed by the three UK party leaders before the independence referendum.
Unsurprisingly, the Record gives rather less prominence to the news that the Vow isn’t worth the fake parchment it wasn’t written on than it did to repeatedly hyping it up and then proclaiming that it had already been delivered.
But there’s a twist.
