The website of the Dumfries & Galloway Conservative Party yesterday:
Perhaps they read the press coverage of the Salmond-Darling debate later on.
We almost forgot to mention this.
Not for the first time, readers, you’ve left us gobsmacked sideways. Despite previous successes we were a little apprehensive about this latest fundraiser, as people have been getting asked for a lot of money by a lot of groups in recent months, and we were a bit worried that everyone might have donation fatigue or simply be skint.
That apprehension lasted two and a half hours.
The key exchange on currency from last night’s debate:
At the end of the clip, a flustered Darling finally blurts out what the No camp have been trying not to admit for the entire campaign: “Of course we could use the pound”.
Unionists and journalists are now frantically spinning that they’d never denied such a thing. But we know that’s not true, and nobody got left with more egg on their face than Mr Darling’s supposed superior, Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont.
Things you’ll never hear a Scottish interviewer say.
Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.
He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.
We’ve been so busy with the Wee Blue Book for the past week or so that we only just got round to listening to last Tuesday’s interview with Alistair Darling on Good Morning Scotland in time, before it vanished from the iPlayer. The former Chancellor gets a quite uncomfortable ride from presenter Gary Robertson, and flaps angrily for much of the ten-and-a-half minutes trying to turn every question into one on currency.
Mr Darling also makes some startlingly and empirically false statements throughout the interview, and we thought it’d be worth noting a few of them and seeing if they crop up on tonight’s BBC1 debate with the First Minister.
There’s some interesting footage circulating today of a referendum debate for women that took place last week. Many people have focused on No-campaign representative Cat Headley admitting that a “Better Together” leaflet made some highly misleading claims about an independent Scotland’s ranking among the world’s wealthiest countries, but we covered that back in May so we won’t go over it again.
The bit of the meeting that caught our eye is at 1m 36 in the clip above.
Stand by, readers. We’re about to post some porn for stat nerds.
Yeah, you like that, don’t you? What’s a bit less sexy, though, is what the table above means for the “safety and security” of the UK, and the cost of your mortgage.
Labour’s shadow Chancellor quoted in today’s Observer:
This won’t take very long at all.
As part of his Apocalypse Of Doom Revue this week, Gordon Brown provided the Daily Record with a no-questions puff-piece the paper summarised as, “we must continue to share costs of health care and welfare with rest of the union – or pay the price”.
So that’s nice and positive.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
