Set the dials to Maximum Cringe 205
This one, from today’s Scottish Daily Mail, might actually be beyond comment.
This one, from today’s Scottish Daily Mail, might actually be beyond comment.
We suppose we should at least commend the “Vote No Borders” campaign for a certain level of frankness. While their output is little different to the daily hysterical fearmongering of “Better Together”, at least they don’t try to pretend that it’s “positive”.
Sadly, when it comes to the relationship their assertions have with the truth, however, they’re singing very much from the same hymn sheet.
We have not made this story up. It’s not the work of BBC Scotlandshire.
Just casually, there, beneath an unassuming, innocuous headline. No big deal.
An alert reader directed us to this document this morning:
It’s a 2011 study by the non-political Glasgow Centre for Population Health, which attempts to discern why Scotland, and particularly Glasgow, has such appalling life expectancies compared to the rest of the UK. And its findings are startling.
Watch (from 5m 50s) as David Cameron refuses to commit to having a bill for more powers for Holyrood in the first Queen’s Speech should he win the 2015 election.
Vote no, get nothing, and get it never.
The unionist case for Scots voting No in the independence referendum is encapsulated in the following quote from the website of “Better Together”, the official No campaign:
“Devolution offers us the best of both worlds: we have a strong Scottish Parliament taking important decisions about schools, hospitals and jobs AND we benefit from the strength, security and opportunities we can take advantage of being part of a bigger United Kingdom.”
The main problem with this argument is that there’s an alternative Union which would provide the Scottish Parliament with more powers to “take important decisions about” things and allow Scotland to “benefit from” and “take advantage of’” the “strength, security and opportunities” of being part of something far bigger than the UK itself.
Several of today’s papers run with the story that in giving evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in Westminster, George Osborne yesterday made the claim that Scots could run out of cash under independence, as Scottish banks would no longer be able to print their own pound notes guaranteed by the Bank of England.
Osborne’s argument is that Scottish notes are accepted as currency in the UK under the Banknote (Scotland) Act of 1845. However, this legislation would no longer apply after independence without a currency union, thereby making Scots notes worthless.
In what was an oddly nervous and evasive performance before the Committee – despite its extremely friendly questioning – it was one of the Chancellor’s stranger assertions.
We’ve been wiping tears of laughter from our eyes most of this morning, after reading one of the most magnificently bare-faced and audacious pieces of black-is-white lying we think we might ever have seen printed with a straight face in a British newspaper.
It appears in the Telegraph, which seems to have positioned itself latterly as the Daily Sport for people with a reading age above seven, and makes the mindboggling claim that “Contrary to its media image, the campaign to save the United Kingdom says it has more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents”.
In fairness, it doesn’t actually say whether these boots have any feet in them.
Monday:
(UK government “factsheet” issued by the Scotland Office.)
Wednesday:
“For the average mortgage in Scotland, there would be £5,400 more [in] mortgage payments a year.”
(George Osborne to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee.)
Yikes! What the hell happened on Tuesday?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.