Louise Morton is the Vice Chair of Moray Labour Party. She’s already familiar to some of our more veteran and alert readers for laughing when Yes activists were intimidated out of campaigning at a local fair with threats of violence.
Less than two days after Labour’s hapless candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus resigned for likening some children at a peaceful protest to the Hitler Youth, Ms Morton – whose son Sean is the party’s 2015 candidate for the Moray seat – thought it’d be a wizard jape to tweet this:

It’s like a disease, readers. They can’t keep a lid on their hatred to save their lives.
Tags: smears
Category
comment, idiots, scottish politics
Jill Stephenson is (or maybe was) Professor Emerita of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh. She was the subject of a substantial profile piece in the Times a couple of months ago on the subject of the independence campaign, which called her “one of the most compelling voices in support of the Union” (as well as somewhat inflating her status to just “Professor Emerita of History”), and therefore we must take her to be a respectable commentator who wouldn’t tell crude flat-out lies.

So we were intrigued to notice the above tweet from yesterday. Can anyone point us to Professor Curtice actually making such a claim? It would surely be significant if the country’s leading (and apparently only) psephologist had indeed said that Yes voters were just a bunch of thickos. At the very least it would somewhat colour his analysis, which we’ve hitherto always considered professional and impartial.
We’ve got to pop out for a bit, so any help would be appreciated.
Tags: smears
Category
comment, idiots, investigation, scottish politics
Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)
The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.
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Tags: headline ferret, misinformation
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
About 11 minutes and 30 seconds into last night’s Scotland 2014, Labour MP Gemma Doyle repeated one of the strangest arguments Labour use against independence. Having first denied that she’d ever seen any polls suggesting that the people of Scotland wanted to get rid of the Trident nuclear weapons system, she then fell back on the curious but much-used Labour line that getting rid of it would only move it “100 miles or so down the road”, and therefore be pointless.
There are all sorts of glaringly obvious flaws in that argument. One is the de facto case that the UK actually has nowhere else it can put Trident, and therefore if Scotland expels it the rUK will become a non-nuclear-weapons state by default.
The second is that even if there was somewhere for it to go, Scotland still wouldn’t be paying for it any more, which would be a huge benefit to the Scottish budget and a pretty good reason entirely aside from the moral and safety issues.

And the third is that Gemma Doyle doesn’t appear to know where England is.
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Tags: flat-out lies
Category
apocalypse, debunks, reference, scottish politics
The Guardian has a story today about what Herald journalist Paul Hutcheon pithily described yesterday as Jim Murphy MP’s “100 day tour of Scottish Labour activists”, which we’ve previously featured on this site.

But we were contacted by an alert reader who made a point echoed by one of the replies to Hutcheon’s tweet – doesn’t Mr Murphy already have a full-time job?
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Category
comment, investigation, scottish politics
Most newspapers have a story today about the resignation of Labour parliamentary candidate Kathy Wiles after her long history of abusive and offensive comments on social media was exposed on this site on Monday and Tuesday.
The BBC, STV, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, Express, Times, Courier and most others all report the story to varying degrees of accuracy, and most of the pieces are all but identical, featuring the same quotes. (Only the Telegraph declines to mention it, perhaps out of embarrassment over this unfortunately-timed, one-sided Alan Cochrane rant about “cybernats” on the same day Ms Wiles caught everyone’s attention.)
As the local paper of the would-be MP for Angus the Courier’s coverage is the best, with not only the standard resignation story but also a slightly deeper delve into her lengthy record of nasty postings and an editorial leader column, which is the only place we’ve seen raise the more important question arising from the incident.
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Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
Honest Alistair Darling, interviewed by the BBC in 2008.
Smooth.
Tags: and finally, captain darling
Category
scottish politics, video
The Guardian, 1 July 2014:
“Many British people will never afford an acceptable minimum living standard
The chances of people on low incomes affording a decent life, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, have dramatically reduced.
We know we go on about this quite a lot, but it’s pretty important – if the Tories win the next election, they’ll cut billions of pounds more from the welfare budget. If Labour win it, they’ve pledged that they’ll be even TOUGHER on welfare than the Tories.
Welfare isn’t just about the unemployed, though the unemployed don’t deserve to suffer either. Millions of people in full-time work need benefits to top up their earnings to even remotely close to a liveable standard. Whether under Labour or the Tories, the prospects for the poor are bleak and getting bleaker, no matter how hard they work.
Scotland, alone, has an option for real change available. Just about every billionaire businessman in the country wants Scots to turn that chance down. UK government ministers who rely on Scotland’s multi-billion-pound annual net contribution to the Treasury want them to turn it down. Labour MPs who’ll be out of a cushy job-for-life if there’s a Yes vote want them to turn it down.
All we’d say is if you’re planning to vote No and you’re NOT a billionaire businessman, a UK government minister or a Labour MP, it might be worth wondering why that is.
Tags: qft
Category
comment, uk politics
Every rock that we look under near Labour’s newest Westminster candidate Kathy Wiles – who thinks that 7-year-olds taking part in a peaceful Yes protest are akin to the Hitler Youth, and that “most” SNP voters are benefit scroungers – sees lots more nasty little cockroaches skittering out and running from the sudden influx of light.

But despite setting a high bar with the comments above, Ms Wiles keeps clearing it.
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Tags: foreigner watch
Category
comment, disturbing, scottish politics
There’s a strange phenomenon at the heart of Scottish politics, and it runs far deeper than the independence referendum. It’s summed up pretty well in this image.

The picture and the comment alongside come from the Facebook page of Labour’s newest Parliamentary candidate, Kathy Wiles. They were made more than two months ago, so you’d imagine that any selection committee worth even a quarter of a damn would have checked her out enough to have a look at her social-media accounts and see if she might have said – or be likely to say in future – anything stupid.
But the thing is, we’re sure they did. Because as far as Scottish Labour as concerned, calling “most” of the voters of the most popular party in the country a bunch of workshy scroungers only interested in claiming benefits isn’t even a gaffe. It’s pretty much the official policy position.
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Category
analysis, comment, idiots, scottish politics