This is Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Eddie Bone of the Campaign for an English Parliament in a remarkable nine minutes of “Good Morning Scotland” this morning.
It’s the nearest to sounding like a Yes voter you’ll ever hear James Naughtie. Enjoy.
An alert reader drew our attention to a piece in the Telegraph on Monday.
Lordy, where to start?
Saluting one of our favourite movies of all time.
(The glasses are here. Well over 100,000 downloads so far today.)
Because you know he’s coming. Do you feel lucky, Labour voters?
Here’s an extraordinary display from Labour’s Jim Murphy, still standing on an Irn Bru crate and drawing crowds of up to a dozen people (several of whom sometimes aren’t even Labour staffers) in 100 locations across Scotland. This one’s apparently Ayr.
Not only does the former Secretary of State for Scotland spend most of his time bellowing furiously despite already being the only person with a microphone, but the demented rant he embarks on when asked a question by a lady in the crowd about Gordon Brown’s disgraceful lies over organ transplants will have readers used to Mr Murphy’s normal TV persona blinking and rubbing their eyes.
Most striking, though, is his complete refusal to meet the woman’s eye at the end of his extended “SNP BAD!” outburst, in which he’d completely ignored her simple and reasonable question. Several times at the end you can see him consciously turn away from her so as not to catch her gaze, presumably out of shame.
Vote No and trust him with Scotland’s future, readers.
There’s been a small furore this week over fracking, and the possibility that the UK government could grant licences for drilling in some of Scotland’s most beautiful locations, including – astonishingly – Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park.
But in fairness, we can’t say that we weren’t warned.
Our “Better Together” mole has just leaked us this exclusive extract from a new cinema advert with a re-imaged Alistair Darling listing the consequences of a Yes vote.
It’s really from the 1981 Labour conference, of course. But it’s fascinating to note that while the No camp leader’s politics may have softened somewhat over the intervening 33 years, his modus operandi hasn’t changed a bit.
Does anyone know if Alistair Darling (left, with banner) is still a republican?
He doesn’t seem to talk about it much these days.
We suspect this isn’t one of the ones Mr Darling gets paid £10,000 for.
Still, only putting out 12 seats is one way to guarantee a “standing room only” crowd.
For independence supporters of a certain age, the 1979 devolution referendum is one of the most infamous moments in Scottish history. While a wafer-thin majority of Scots voted Yes to devolution, an electoral fiddle conceived by a Labour MP meant that it didn’t happen, and part of the reason was that in effect, dead people were counted as No votes.
(We won’t go into all the details here, but basically an impossible threshold was set for turnout, and people who’d died but hadn’t yet been removed from the electoral roll were counted towards the calculation of that threshold.)
We were put in mind of it by an odd development this evening.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
