Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today marked the historic nomination of Scotland’s first female First Minister with a Daily Record column in characteristically sour style, which waited until the second paragraph before sticking in a Margaret Thatcher comparison.
It wasn’t until later that it got confusing.
…is the phrase that was making us chuckle this morning.
It headed an article of disingenuous carping so feeble that we can’t even be bothered archive-linking to it, entitled “Ten SNP Fails Since 2007”, because Margaret is bare down with the kids, innit? But we couldn’t help noticing one of the examples.
Owen Jones in the Guardian today:
You know where we’re going with this one, right?
Here’s Nick Clegg in many of today’s papers:
“Alex Salmond reminds me of a Japanese soldier found in the jungle 20 years after the war had finished, still ducking at every shadow, thinking the war was still on. At some point, you have to call it a day and accept that the people have spoken.
After a ferociously contested referendum that has dominated debate north of the border for years, not just months, there was a pretty emphatic result.
And Mr Clegg, as we know, is a man of his word. The AV referendum in 2011 was lost by a colossal margin of more than two to one – a gap of 36 points rather than the mere 10 independence was defeated by. So that’ll be the end of that.
With reference to our post from earlier today, we couldn’t help but notice Scottish Labour whining loudly this morning about the award of the ScotRail franchise to Dutch state-owned railway company Abellio. (On what sound like very good terms.)
We asked the party’s infrastructure spokesman James Kelly what Labour would have done instead had they been in power, and got no reply. So we went and had a look, and it turned out there was a clear and simple answer.
The Daily Record, 27 Aug 2014:
And Mr Brown again in the Observer, 31 August 2014:
They want to cut corporation tax by 3p in the pound. That’s less for health and pensions, not more.”
Veteran readers will know where we’re going next.
Any enterprise as crass, witless and poorly-thought-out as Dan Snow’s “Let’s Stay Together” campaign – funded by the same man who gives millions to murderous war criminals and populated by a curious mix of billionaire Tories, Sirs, Lords, Baronesses and Z-list nobodies – will always create all manner of hostages to fortune.
We’ve already mentioned David Starkey, who felt able to pledge his love to Scotland despite having previously called it a “feeble little country” obsessed with the “deeply boring provincial poet Burns” and “the awful bagpipe”. The “celebrity” list also featured Ross Kemp (who previously likened Glasgow to a third-world warzone) and the deeply unpleasant right-wing columnist Rod Liddle, who opined in 2010 that:
And then there was “hard man” actor and bookies’ shill Ray Winstone.
Quite a few people picked up on Winstone’s appearance last year as the guest host of “Have I Got News For You”, in which he trotted out a list of tired stereotypes and suggested Scotland should “bugger off”. But as we noted at the time, HIGNFY is a comedy show produced by public schoolboys for whom patronising the “Jocks” is second nature and not worth getting worked up about.
What bothers us a little more is Ray’s view on the country he wants Scots to stay in.
This is Andy Burnham, Labour’s shadow health secretary, earlier this week:
And here’s a press release from the Unite trade union in 2009, when Labour were in power and Mr Burnham actually was the Health Secretary:
Alert readers might be thinking that headline sounds vaguely familiar and they’d be right, because we published a post two months ago with a similar title, highlighting the curiously inverse relationship between media scare stories about alleged abuse in the referendum campaign for which there’s no evidence whatsoever and actual abuse that really happened.
We were put in mind of it this week, after the Daily Record ran a particularly barrel-scraping “vile cybernats” piece about how a Labour activist from England got a little bit of extremely mild stick on Twitter after announcing he was on his way to Scotland to stick his nose in the independence debate, and how he WORRIED that he might meet a hostile reception at the railway station (although of course, and happily, he didn’t).
“Better Together” campaign leaders Blair McDougall and Alistair Darling constantly demand that the Yes campaign, and Alex Salmond in particular, takes responsibility for and action against random online nutters behaving in abusive or threatening ways, even when those people have no discernible connection to Yes Scotland or the SNP.
But they’re less keen on putting their own house in order.
Below is a clip from the short report on social media in the independence referendum that appeared on tonight’s STV News, and will apparently also air on Scotland Tonight. (You can see the whole thing here.)
Like every other media report of our article about Alex Johnstone MSP, it omits the bit where we explained WHY we called him some rude names, but in this case we’re happy to accept that that was for reasons of time.
The more interesting bit is Johnstone’s own comments, because the MSP’s reaction is a breathtaking piece of hypocritical dishonesty that seems to us to be entirely in keeping with the character of the man.
Kudos is due to the Daily Record today, which has a large and prominent feature about NHS surgeon Dr Philippa Whitford, with whom readers should be familiar. Her message, from a position of knowledge and authority, of the fate awaiting the NHS on both sides of the border is a powerful one and makes a strong case for a Yes vote.
Obviously, that upsets both Labour and the No campaign very much.
Channel 4 has now aired its Dispatches programme about “intimidation”, in which a lot of grown adults from the cut-throat world of business whined about possible vague hints they may or may not have picked up that the Scottish Government would rather they kept quiet about independence.
The estimable Lallands Peat Worrier skewers the subject brilliantly here, so we shan’t detain ourselves further with the specifics – other than to passingly note that as Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine tweeted during the show, one of the alleged victims was so frightened and cowed into submission that he’s currently suing the Scottish Government at the European Court about something else entirely.
But there was something else that had us puzzled.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
