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
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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Tags: foreigner watch
Category
analysis, comment, uk politics
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”.
And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.
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Tags: one nation, project fear, smears
Category
disturbing, scottish politics
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.
We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.
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Tags: devo minus
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
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:
Can you supply the missing words?
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analysis, uk politics
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.
It won’t make any sense unless you read the post first. It’s here.
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Tags: and finally, one nation, unionist of the day, vote no get nothing
Category
comment, idiots
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
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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comment, scottish politics
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.
Click all the pics for larger versions.
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Category
pictures
I didn’t take nearly enough photos. But there’ll be more coming from others.
What a day that was.
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Category
comment, pictures
[We’ve got something special for those of you who can’t make it to the march in Edinburgh today (or are reading en route). Julie McDowall pens the Herald’s brilliant online dating blog, but there’s a lot more to her writing than that.]
There is a groove on my skull. I can run my fingertip along it.
On your first day in a call centre they present you with a headset. You might chuckle when you first wear it, pretending to be Madonna or a helicopter pilot. But the chuckles die at the end of the shift when you lift the metal band and ruffle your hair, feeling the dent on your head.
And it can hurt, so you start to unclamp the contraption between calls and hang it round your neck, but a manager is soon gesturing wildly at you with the ‘hood up’ signal. Get that metal band clamped back onto your head. You may not remove it.
After a few years, a permanent line is engraved on your skull. You are branded.
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Tags: Julie McDowall, perspectives
Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics
