…for us off their own bat this week, unasked. It’s pretty awesome, though we haven’t the slightest idea what we could use it for. (What it really makes us want is a snazzy 1cm-thick cutout metal version of the logo to use as a poker guard. Anyone?)
But when we have our own nightly current-affairs TV show on an independent Scottish Broadcasting Service, it looks like the intro is pretty much sorted. 🙂
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Category
media, misc, navel-gazing, stats, video
One of the more persistent scare stories deployed by the No campaign is the claim that Scottish higher education will be crippled by a Yes vote, thanks to the weight of applications to Scottish universities from students in the rest of the UK, who will then be entitled by EU law to free tuition, whereas they currently have to pay up to £9000 a year (with the figure set to increase).
For good measure they also claim that tens of thousands of young Scots will be “frozen out” of university education by the flood of incomers from, in particular, England. Those damn foreigners, eh?
It sounds like a solid argument. But is it?
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Tags: Scott Minto
Category
analysis, debunks, europe, scottish politics
The UK government is about to put another taxpayer-funded leaflet through every door in Scotland, laden with dire warnings about the consequences of independence.
Boiled down to just five bullet points – one of which is the meaningless “best of both worlds” – it presents the case for the UK as amounting to keeping the pound (which Scotland can do either way), higher public spending (omitting the fact that Scots pay over the odds for said spending), jobs with UK companies (which would be unaffected because EU law demands freedom of employment) and lower energy bills.
The latter is based on the oft-repeated claim that fuel bills would rise in Scotland because the rUK would no longer pay to import subsidised Scottish renewable energy. But an article in The Ecologist this week, by two respected academics from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, blows that argument out of the water.
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Tags: qft, the positive case for the union
Category
comment, debunks, scottish politics
From this interesting documentary last month on Al Jazeera.
This is how they think they’ll win. 49 days left to prove them wrong.
Tags: cringe
Category
comment, scottish politics, video
The referendum is NEXT MONTH, everyone. NEXT MONTH.
Category
comment, scottish politics
We’re big fans of Kevin Bridges. Not only is he one of the finest comedians Scotland has produced in many years, it turns out the Glasgow comic is also a top fella. On seeing a tweet last month from the Maryhill food bank showing some perilously empty shelves, Kevin got straight in touch, asked how much money it would need to fill them and turned up with Tesco vouchers for the whole £1000.
We salute him wholeheartedly, and it was right and proper that the story was widely covered in the press, with the Scottish Sun (pictured above), Daily Record and STV News all reporting the generous gesture, and all of them also mentioning that Celtic star Kris Commons’ wife Lisa Hague had made much-needed contributions too.
There was something missing, though.
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Category
comment
This man is still regularly invited on TV by both the BBC and STV as a serious pundit.
Were anyone to still be unsure of the fact that different rules of behaviour apply to Unionists and Yes supporters, we invite them to consider the evidence.
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Category
comment, scottish politics, scum
We can only assume the No campaign and media are in a growing panic about the imminent TV showdown between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling or something. Even by the high previous standards of insanity from the UK side of the referendum debate, this week has seen something of a disintegration in sanity.
Apart from the usual flood of mad scare stories, we’ve had papers like the Scotsman, Daily Record and Press & Journal promoting a ludicrous poll of a couple of hundred hand-picked expats. We’ve had the Guardian’s Martin Kettle competing with the Mail’s Simon Heffer for the most embarrassingly moronic vision of a post-independence future yet committed to print. (This time, a Yes vote sparks a new civil war in Ireland.)
And then there’s this:
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics, video, wtf
We did tell you this was coming:
The poll in question can actually be found on Daily Record sister site Scotland Now, so we’re not entirely sure why the Scotsman is plugging it for them. But if you’d like to see the hilariously loaded and leading questions that delivered the result in question, just pop back to this Wings Over Scotland piece from about three weeks ago.
To be honest, in the circumstances we’re amazed it was as low as 74%.
Category
comment, scottish politics, world
