Because this is a pure embarrassment from the notional main opposition leader. Even if it was all true – and we’d be very sceptical about that until we see the workings – £4.5 billion over 14 years would be £321 million a year.
That’s a substantial amount of money, but it’s also almost exactly 1% of the Scottish Government’s budget, and no government on Earth has ever had everything it attempted work out perfectly. Sustaining 99% efficiency on spending over nearly a decade and a half is actually pretty good going.
More to the point, it’s a staggeringly audacious attack line from a Westminster MP in a party whose government wasted £12 billion on ONE project in ONE year alone – the catastrophically failed COVID test-and-trace app.
(We’d still like someone to explain to us how in the world you can possibly spend £12 billion in a few months on a mobile phone app, even if it had worked.)
Just over a hundred years ago, the rights of women in the UK were still entirely decided by men. Women didn’t have the vote (a small minority would be given it in 1918, but most would have another decade to wait), there were no women in Parliament, and women basically had no say in anything that happened.
Record scratch and jump-cut to the present day.
That’s Kirsty Blackman, an SNP MP elected in 2015 who wouldn’t even have been allowed to stand for election a hundred years earlier, and who seems determined to take women’s rights back to that century.
It really is deeply dispiriting the see the level of utter burning contempt in which Nicola Sturgeon holds the independence movement, if this is the sort of ludicrously insulting garbage she thinks it’ll swallow.
The BBC’s coverage of the Scottish election campaign and what has been described as its “virtual blackout” of ALBA will be the subject of special Ofcom election Committee hearing on Friday 23rd April.
We imagine people may wish to read the Alba Party manifesto.
It can be downloaded by clicking the link above. Had we formed our own party it’s pretty much the manifesto we’d have written, and we especially endorse the gorgeous pooch on the front.
The First Minister released a short film this week.
While it has the character of a hostage video, with terrorists just off-camera pointing a gun at the unfortunate victim and forcing them to read out a pre-prepared text, sadly we doubt that was the case. We think this is really what she believes and intends.
We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.
By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.
He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.
(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)
So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.
So-called “puberty blockers” – the class of drugs that were used to “chemically castrate” computing pioneer Alan Turing for being homosexual (a crime in the UK in the 1950s), which is believed to have led to his suicide by cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 are extremely dangerous.
Scotland’s only gender clinic, the Sandyford, had to apologise just a few months ago for having concealed the very serious hazards posed by the drugs. But it has no plans to stop prescribing them to under-16s.
And the Scottish Government refuses to intervene in the matter.
Geri on The Broken Rainbow: “The UK is heading towards a Totalitarian state where this ideology will seep into every single persons private life &…” May 14, 01:19
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Broken Rainbow: “SCOTS PRIMARY SCHOOL CHALLENGED OVER FAILURE TO PROVIDE SINGLE-SEX TOILETS A pupil has been left in pain and distress after…” May 14, 00:40
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Broken Rainbow: “DRAFT ‘CONVERSION THERAPY’ BILL IN KING’S SPEECH AGAIN The Government has repeated its pledge to bring forward a draft Bill…” May 14, 00:31
Geri on The Broken Rainbow: “Polling means absolutely zero. It can be manipulated, rigged, depends on how the questions are asked & who exactly is…” May 13, 23:46
Hatey McHateface on The Broken Rainbow: “@Geri Polling evidence is clear enough. If a Reform government offered us a referendum next week, a majority of Scots…” May 13, 23:08
Geri on The Hills Of Far Away: “SNP had various mandates. How do you know they vote for something else? An election isn’t a referendum. The Yes…” May 13, 23:06
Geri on The Broken Rainbow: “Reform wouldn’t offer Independence. They certainly wouldn’t deliver on it. They’d not let the UK cash cow just walk out…” May 13, 22:56
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: ““refused what we vote for” You’re refused what YOU vote for, Geri, because the majority of Scots vote for something…” May 13, 22:44
John on The Broken Rainbow: “well- the only way to fix it would be to “true” proportional representation, as in the German Bundestag. Problem with…” May 13, 22:14
100%Yes on The Broken Rainbow: “John Swinney will now sell Scotland for federalism make no mistake this is what’s going to happen. The SNP leadership…” May 13, 22:01
Geri on The Hills Of Far Away: “AI Dan “fluff”? Yer sounding more & more like Franchise Fanny by the day. You just can’t help yersel. As…” May 13, 21:45
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: “Havers, Northy, you’re confusing meaning with interpretation. The Egyptians, demonstrably the finest stone workers who have ever graced this planet…” May 13, 20:47
100%Yes on The Broken Rainbow: “Has anyone watch the mid week Scottish Prism, take a look. Already JS has backed track on what he said…” May 13, 19:47
Northcode on The Hills Of Far Away: “Rhetoric shapes meaning; a lie hollows it out. A lie is the crack in the stone not a carving… as…” May 13, 19:44
Hatey McHateface on The Broken Rainbow: “Good Lord, Northy! So even the Picts are now using the lying language of the coloniser – English.” May 13, 19:30
100%Yes on The Broken Rainbow: “This policy of kicking Indy into the long grass is now showing in the opinion polls for the SNP. There…” May 13, 19:29
Northcode on The Hills Of Far Away: ““… insults aren’t meant to arguments…” To be or not to be, but where is the ‘be’… I forgot to…” May 13, 19:28
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: “You omitted to say where bare-faced lying fits in, Northy.” May 13, 19:27
Northcode on The Broken Rainbow: “Colonialists in this place very often mistake disruption for cleverness and noise for wit, but “the stone knows the difference”,…” May 13, 19:18
Northcode on The Hills Of Far Away: ““Calling people “thick cants” isn’t an argument either.” Correct, but then again insults aren’t meant to arguments… not directly, anyway.…” May 13, 19:08
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: “Well, well. So the Falklands now has an outfit backed by a state with the determination, skill, technology and balls…” May 13, 18:48
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: “@Aidan There’s a war crimes tribunal in permanent session atween Geri’s lugs. In the interests of efficiency, she volunteered to…” May 13, 18:40
Hatey McHateface on The Broken Rainbow: “Lucky for Scotland that the boys petitioning the UN make all of this democratic voting malarkey a pointless sideshow. Beats…” May 13, 18:35
duncanio on The Broken Rainbow: “I didn’t say it was an alternative. I said it was imperfect but less imperfect than FPTP. Otherwise you would…” May 13, 18:31
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: ““Do you think have a special, unique entitlement to type insults” Does not compute. Re-type and re-submit.” May 13, 18:25
Hatey McHateface on The Hills Of Far Away: ““Calling something “horseshit” isn’t an argument” Hark at Northy! Only yesterday he was calling people “thick cants”. Ken fit sane,…” May 13, 18:19
Jay on The Hills Of Far Away: “Commander-in-Chief Caveman, I’ve no idea whether you will read this.. What is pretentious in my comment? I do not pretend,…” May 13, 18:17
Captain Caveman on The Hills Of Far Away: “@Aidan “Of course people living in a rich and prosperous country cosplaying as victims is one thing you missed from…” May 13, 17:38
Rev. Stuart Campbell on The Broken Rainbow: “Ever since 2016, the SNP’s policy has basically been to kick it down the road for two years at a…” May 13, 17:33
Rev. Stuart Campbell on The Broken Rainbow: “It made zero difference to the point anyway. But gah, too many numbers flying around at once.” May 13, 17:32