It’s our own fault for reading a Brian Monteith column in the Scotsman, but:
“Am I the only person that finds it rather rich that Alex Salmond is so keen on debating the views of David Cameron, an Englishman with an English constituency, when he consciously arranged for the views of tens of thousands of people on the Scottish electoral register to be excluded from taking part in the referendum? Why did he not wish to hear their views?”
Hang on – Alex Salmond did what now? As far as we know, if you’re on the Scottish electoral register you get a vote in the referendum. What happened? Which “tens of thousands of people” are we talking about here? Shouldn’t this have been in the news or something? We hate trying to catch up after the holidays.
Category
scottish politics, wtf
We were as perplexed as anyone by the bizarre YouGov poll commissioned by “Better Together” and released today, which reveals that the status quo they’re so strenuously campaigning for is the least popular constitutional option among Scots. As there’s no “more powers” option on the referendum ballot paper, and the official No campaign can neither define any such option nor pledge to implement one, it’s hard to understand what they get from asking a three-choice question about a two-choice vote.
Indeed, the survey’s result – 32% “more devolution”, 30% independence, 29% status quo – actually gives a higher Yes figure than some recent two-option polls. So what on Earth can the No camp be thinking?
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
It’s one of the weirder aspects of the independence debate that the No campaign constantly shrieks about how an independent Scotland might run a deficit, as if that was some sort of unusual and terrifying state unique to Scotland. So we thought it might be handy to keep this clip from today’s BBC Breakfast here for future reference.
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Category
comment, reference, scottish politics, uk politics
Continuing our daily serialisation of HJ Paton’s fascinating 1968 book “The Claim Of Scotland”, courtesy of splendidly alert and dedicated reader Wilma Watts.
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Tags: claimofscotland
Category
culture, history, scottish politics
We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.
So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.
And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.
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Category
scottish politics
We’re enormously grateful to the alert reader who uncovered this little gem. “The Claim Of Scotland” is a book published in 1968 and written by one Herbert James Paton, a philosopher and a senior civil servant at the Admiralty and Foreign Office, who sadly died the following year.
If you click the image above, you’ll find a scanned PDF of the foreword, contents and first chapter, which at just 14 pages is a modest task of reading. Prepare yourself to marvel at how little times have changed since this pre-North Sea oil age, and to smile ruefully at a few of the sentences you’ll encounter.
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Tags: claimofscotland
Category
culture, history, scottish politics, uk politics
Awesome start on healing those divisions, Johann.
(From today’s Scottish Sun.)
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Category
comment, scottish politics
Okay, readers, it’s time to speak your brains. We’ve been evolving the synergy of the Wings customer-facing recognition interface in line with the leading edge of the zeitgeist over the years, from our early crude banners through to the current clean and eye-catching style, and it’s time to pick the logo that’ll take us through 2014.
Give us your thoughts, whydoncha?
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Category
admin, pictures
Is to mercilessly and with extreme prejudice delete the comments of anyone who doesn’t put the right amount of paragraph breaks in them.
Just sayin’.
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Category
admin
