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On holiday with foreigners 108

Posted on September 26, 2013 by

It’s amazing what a trip away can do: refresh, educate, put a new slant on an old debate. I was in the US recently. The first thing I learned was before departure, and I pass it on as a tip: if you’re going to the US, fly from Dublin, not a UK airport. Apart from being about half the price – presumably because they have control over their airport taxes, so can adjust them to compete with Heathrow – it makes life far easier.

customs

When I last flew to the US from a UK airport, long before 9/11, we were held in a bleak corridor without any amenities for well over an hour before being processed through immigration, where we were interrogated about the purpose of our visit, what address we were staying at, and where we were going exactly. It put me off re-visiting the States for a long time.

Flying from Dublin is a different experience.

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Category comment, culture, world

Quoted for proof 154

Posted on September 26, 2013 by

Because we keep telling you what a No vote really means:

“That is why I am talking quite passionately about getting English Labour MPs back up the road and for me, sitting down with Neil [Findlay] and Richard [Simpson] and Rhoda [Grant] and others and saying, let’s get health policies that can be consistent across England, Scotland and Wales.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing, pulling in the same direction as opposed to pulling our separate ways?

Devolution, in its early days, was about doing something different and it needs to enter a different phase where we start talking again more about a UK-wide policy because in the end, that helps everybody.”

That’s Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham talking to Holyrood Magazine this week, in comments strangely unpublicised in the rest of the Scottish media.

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Category analysis, comment, disturbing, scottish politics

The phoney war 193

Posted on September 26, 2013 by

One of the recurring themes we hear from people about the independence debate (from Yes, No and Don’t Know folks alike) is a bewilderment about the alleged amount of grassroots campaigning undertaken by the No camp. “Better Together” is fond of making extravagant claims on its website about its number of volunteers, events and leaflets, yet almost nobody we speak to has ever seen any of them.

So we were interested to receive an email from a reader this week.

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Category comment, scottish politics

The afterthought 274

Posted on September 25, 2013 by

Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.

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Category analysis, comment, uk politics

Quoted for irony 419

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

In a piece entitled “Scottish Labour leader says nationalism is a virus”, the Courier yesterday reported that Johann Lamont’s speech to the Labour conference “appeared to allude to the European 20th century fascist movement”.

blondelamonte

And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.

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Tags: , ,
Category disturbing, scottish politics

Throwing mud in glass houses 114

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

There’s been a certain amount of hoo-haa within the independence camp this morning about a Telegraph piece reporting comments by Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran in which she appears to cast doubt on whether devolution has been a good thing for Scotland at all.

curran

We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.

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Category analysis, comment, scottish politics

Filling in the blanks 93

Posted on September 24, 2013 by

Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:

missing

Can you supply the missing words?

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Category analysis, uk politics

We’ve got five minutes spare 123

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Arch-Unionist and BBC-favoured pundit (hey, what a freakish coincidence! What are the odds?) Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University has a blog post up today. A reader asked us to go and tackle it, but Prof. Tomkins has one of those infinitely irritating twatblogs that won’t let you post comments unless you hand over all your personal details and give permission for spambots to assail your Facebook and Twitter accounts with annoying gibberish, so we’ll have to do it here instead.

uniontwat3

It won’t make any sense unless you read the post first. It’s here.

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Tags: , , ,
Category comment, idiots

A flavour of the day 153

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Okay, one last thing. This is the best footage of Saturday we’ve seen:

(Oh, and the Scottish Police Federation are now tweeting a crowd figure of 20,000.)

Category scottish politics, video

Normal service coming soon 340

Posted on September 23, 2013 by

Okay, we’ve got a LOT of housekeeping-type stuff to get on with, so the next couple of days might be a wee bit quiet. We’ll need to be dealing with the ridiculous goings-on at the Labour conference this weekend at some point, but for now let’s just round up the last few issues regarding Saturday’s awesome independence march and rally and get it all out of the way.

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Category comment, scottish politics

Readers’ lives 437

Posted on September 22, 2013 by

We’ve already run a small collection of our own ham-fisted snapshots, but here are just a few of our favourite pics of yesterday’s rally in Edinburgh that were taken and sent to us by Wings Over Scotland readers.

flagsforth

Click all the pics for larger versions.

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Category pictures

And now over to the state broadcaster 67

Posted on September 22, 2013 by

1280

Tags: ,
Category media, pictures

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