Then and now 165
Posted on
January 04, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The union of the snakes 418
Posted on
January 03, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s a new hot topic among the Westminster commentariat.
Because desperate times call for desperate measures.
We really do adore him 304
Posted on
January 02, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
If twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then these five recent pictures of “Saint” Jim Murphy – the martyr who endured an egging for all our sins – from the print media surely tell us something interesting.
The Ne’erday Game 277
Posted on
January 01, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.
Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.
That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.
And that matters more than you think it does.
That was a year that was 355
Posted on
December 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A simple plan 304
Posted on
December 30, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Scottish Labour clearly get a pretty good deal from the printers’ shop that makes the giant pound coins, because they’re waving them around again.
The North British branch office’s latest wizard jape is to upset all the people who they urged to join for £5 just last month – never mind the gullible saps forking out nine times that much – by offering cut-price memberships at £1 a year.
It’s what the retail trade calls a “loss leader” – in effect the party will be paying people to join, because £1 won’t come anywhere near to covering the cost of processing each new member, sending them a membership card and so on.
But it did give us an idea.
The Slightly Overweight Quiz Of The Year 144
Posted on
December 30, 2014 by
Andrew Leslie
A traditional brainteaser to test your Alert Reader Quotient for 2014. All the answers can be found somewhere on Wings (though not always in the obvious places).
Using the Search facility is cheating.
The death of duopoly 221
Posted on
December 29, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The chief opponents of UK electoral reform are the Labour and Conservative parties, who by an astonishing coincidence are also the two parties who benefit by far the most from the undemocratic stitch-up that is First Past The Post, by which more than half of the votes cast in Britain result in no Parliamentary representation whatsoever.
The excuse they normally use to justify a system by which one of them will usually get a large absolute majority on barely over one-third of the votes cast is that FPTP produces “strong” governments, where “strong” is defined to mean “no possibility of the opposition, which speaks for two-thirds of the population, ever defeating the ruling party in a vote”.
The AV referendum was taken as a ringing endorsement of this principle, although in practice it offered just a bafflingly complicated and even less attractive version of the status quo. But a remarkable poll in Scotland this weekend (with detail published in today’s The National) shows that on one side of the border at least, FPTP has completely lost the support of the electorate.
The resentful elephant 182
Posted on
December 28, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Several papers lead this morning with a Panelbase poll showing that a sizeable majority of Scots – regardless of their party allegiances – think that electing a large number of SNP MPs at next May’s UK general election will be the only practical way to safeguard Scotland’s interests in the wake of the referendum No vote.
This poll, currently live on the YouGov website, shows why:
The problem that will arise if most Scottish Labour MPs keep their seats in 2015 will be that there is only one Labour Party and it has only one leader.
Under false pretences 441
Posted on
December 27, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re still supposed to be on a skeleton service for the festive period, but we couldn’t just let this one slide. The cashflow problems at the Labour Party must be more severe than previously thought, because the entire organisation seems to be sharing a single email account. We got yet another begging letter today, from the same address previously named as “Iain McNicol” and “Ed Miliband”, but today’s one was credited to shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero.
Alert readers will recognise the appeal as one we’ve been watching for 11 days now. It’s an attempt by the UK party to raise some cash to employ 10 campaign assistants specifically for Scottish Labour. The jobs are still openly listed as such on the Labour website’s situations-vacant page. Yet the party seems oddly reluctant to say so.
Diversification strategy 137
Posted on
December 26, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Wait, what?
We know there’s a lot of talk of the other Unionist parties stepping aside in order to give Scottish Labour a clear run in 2015, in a desperate attempt to stop the SNP from picking up too many seats, but this is surely taking it a bit far.
