Relaxing at the splendid American Museum high on the hills at the outskirts of town tonight, celebrating Independence Day on a glorious summer’s evening with a few Budweisers, a barbecue and a couple of hundred ex-pats and well-wishers.
Our turn soon.
We haven’t seen anyone giving due kudos to BBC Scotland’s graphics department for this splendid bit of work on last night’s Newsnight Scotland yet, so we’ll do it now.
As “vicious insidious pied-pipers of cybernats”, we appreciate it especially.
The first minute is January to May of 2011. From around 1m 12s, the glass represents the next two years’ referendum polling. Julianne Moore plays the parties of the Union. (Jeff Goldblum is the SNP throughout.) Technically speaking nothing changes for quite a prolonged period. Positions are maintained. But something’s happening.
That’s just how we interpret the situation. We could be wrong, of course.
Hang on – didn’t our “Project Fear” pals spend half of last year sobbing and wailing and raging that a certain tri-morpheme prefix was leading and unfair and beastly and a clear attempt at rigging the referendum by the dastardly, unprincipled Nats?
Maybe our memory’s playing tricks on us. We’re pretty old.
We almost feel sorry for the UKIP candidate for Aberdeen Donside, poor Otto Inglis. All day today he’s been pictured on news bulletins standing silently like a spare object at a wedding while broadcasters interviewed his party’s leader Nigel Farage instead.
Then again, after the brutal shoeing Mr Farage took from STV’s Bernard Ponsonby this evening, perhaps Mr Inglis will be feeling he got the best end of the deal.
With apologies to both The Jungle Book and Animal Farm.
But seriously – how DOES one tell Tories and Labour apart nowadays? Policies?
(JOKE.)
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, for the sake of a change of scenery and a few convivial drinks with the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier and others, a meeting of the Oxfordshire branch of the Green Party. The subject of the meeting was Scottish independence, which as you might imagine is something of a niche interest in Oxford (let alone among Greens in Oxford).
I don’t precisely recall the number of people who turned up (see “convivial drinks”), but if it wasn’t more than the Scottish Tories drew to the above meeting, hosted by party leader Ruth Davidson, it was certainly within two or three people of it.
For some reason nobody filmed us for the telly, though.
ANDREW NEIL, 5-6-2013: Would you keep child benefit for better-off taxpayers?
MARGARET CURRAN: Well, what we are saying, and Ed will make his own speech tomorrow, and I don’t have foresight of that… What we are saying is when you get into government, and when we come in in 2015, we won’t be able to do all that we wanted to do… Will child benefit for the wealthiest people be our top priority? I’m not sure about that.
ED MILIBAND, 6-6-2013: When it comes to the decisions of the next Labour government it won’t be our biggest priority to overturn the decisions this government has made on taking child benefit away from families earning over £50,000 a year.
We must admit, for someone who hasn’t seen the speech it’s a heck of a guess. Does anyone want to ask Ms Curran if she’s got a score forecast for Croatia vs Scotland?
From the excellent Part 1 of STV’s new documentary “Road To Referendum” (based on the book by Iain Macwhirter, out this week), Labour PM Harold Wilson and Scottish Secretary Willie Ross punt a rather familiar line four decades before Ed Miliband.
We’re sure there’s nothing at all sinister in the fact that the show was unavailable to most viewers due to an unprecedented cross-media technical failure, which also wiped out the STV news at 6pm and this evening’s Scotland Tonight, incidentally.
A FOREIGN POLICY
Margaret Curran should know the truth
Of engaging brain before opening mooth;
Using the word “foreigner”
Like a profanity
Offends large sections of humanity.She should know better and be more carin’Each one of us is a Jock Tamson bairn;To hear an apology would be divine,
But don’t hold your breath – I won’t hold mine.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
