A large and imposing statue built in 1974 still stands today on Clyde Street in Glasgow. It depicts a woman called Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, who was one of the heroes of the anti-fascist resistance in Spain in the 1930s.
The statue was funded by “the British Labour Movement”, but Conservative councillors in the city protested angrily when it was erected and vowed to tear it down if they ever controlled the council (which cynical readers might consider an empty threat).
The gigantic-clown-shoed bunglemuppet that is Scottish Tory MP Ross Thomson was galumphing around social media yesterday, quoting a notoriously dim-witted Yoon troll to the effect that the Scottish Government could (and therefore presumably should) use its own money to compensate the “WASPI women” – a group who’ve been robbed of years of rightful pension payments by the UK government changing the rules after they’d already qualified for their pensions.
This is the well-known hardcore Corbynite commentator John McTernan on the radio yesterday, detailing how outrageous it would be for politicians to attempt to block a second referendum on a divisive but important issue.
Cash is tight in Scotland’s Unionist-run councils.
If only there was something they could do to bring more money in, something they’ve been demanding the Scottish Government do for at least the last seven years and which the councils now have the power to do for themselves.
Since David Torrance shows no sign of being willing to retract the falsehood below that he tweeted earlier today despite our requests, we’ll have to address it here. Apologies for the indulgence.
We can find nowhere that we made any allegation of Torrance being “paid” by RT. We tweeted that he’d “worked for”them, and said he’d “simply appeared on” the channel. Neither of those statements claims that any money changed hands. If Torrance says that he worked for RT for nothing purely in order to get some free publicity for his book, we’re happy to accept that at face value.
(Although we’re not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.)
Mainstream and social media alike are now well into their second day of an absolutely epic meltdown at the news that Alex Salmond is to broadcast a chat show on RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC.
It really is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the shrieking fit the decision has produced. Addled old Lords with criminal convictions for violently and drunkenly assaulting Her Majesty’s police have with an audacious lack of self-awareness decried the immorality of one of HM’s advisors going on TV to talk about stuff, and one Lib Dem MSP has even gone so far as to raise a Holyrood motion demanding that the state interferes with the lawful employment choices of a private citizen.
We imagine that RT will be beside itself with joy at the avalanche of publicity the UK press and political sphere is giving it. We’d be amazed if the hysterical brouhaha didn’t double or treble the audience figures that Salmond could otherwise have expected.
Investigative site The Ferret this afternoon published a report into the Scottish Futures Trust, the SNP’s replacement for Labour’s cripplingly costly PFI projects.
The report was undertaken by Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, a pair of economists well regarded in nationalist circles, and makes some interesting if vague comments about downsides that MIGHT, in theory, exist in the SFT now or in the future.
The headline claims are all full of highly-qualified language (“may not deliver value for money”; “profits may be unduly high”; “could restrict growth”; “potentially has adverse implications”; “impossible to tell whether“), and it’s a long way down the page until you get to anything approaching a hard fact, or indeed the revelation that the report seems to have been paid for by Scottish Labour.
We stuck this short clip up on YouTube yesterday as a throwaway while watching the Labour conference in slack-jawed astonishment (a visitor from an alien planet would have concluded it was the gathering of a party that had just won a landslide victory, not lost its third general election in a row), but on reflection it deserves a proper post.
If you know anything at all about the story of how female Glasgow City Council employees have fought for equal pay, you’ll probably be as outraged as we are at Baxter’s bulletproof brass neck. But the video actually demonstrates what appears to be Scottish Labour’s master strategy for winning back Scotland.
