Month: March 2016

The subject of ruin

Speymouth March 31, 2016

Source: Wings Over Scotland We haven’t seen this published anywhere else, so we may as well do it. We dropped a brief line to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust a few days ago querying their award of a £50,000 grant to disgraced lying MP Alistair Carmichael, specifically in the context of the fact that their own website specifically excludes […]

What's what about Watt

Speymouth March 31, 2016

Source: Northern Scot THE Falconer Museum in Forres re-opens on Tuesday with a new exhibition ‘Power to the People!’

The unsettled will

Speymouth March 31, 2016

Source: Wings Over Scotland This is a Scotsman front page from nine months ago: We don’t think many people would disagree with that. But there’s more. From the Guardian in the same month: But all of that was before the Scotland Bill, right? Nope. Here’s angry Tory candidate and TV pundit Adam Tomkins, just last night: And here he […]

Corporate Media Circles Wagons Around Tories

Speymouth March 31, 2016

Source: Craig Murray I spoke this morning with a Tory MP who has been commendably active on human rights issues in Central Asia, who wanted to speak to me about an article in the Daily Mail. In general conversation, he said Iain Duncan Smith is “disloyal” and the anti-EU Tories are “knuckle draggers”. The last three UK opinion polls have all shown the Tory lead vanished to well within the margin of error, despite all the pollsters making substantial adjustments to uprate the Tory vote following the pollsters’ general election debacle. This has horrified the Blairites who were gleefully predicting […]

Opportunity is always knocking

Speymouth March 31, 2016

Source: Wee Ginger Dug In a parallel universe there’s a Scotland which is reaching for the aspirin, complaining about its collective sore heid as it gets over the national hangover from the first independence day party. That’s a Scotland which has opened a blank page in a new book, and which is about to start writing a story for itself. It will be a story of challenges to be overcome, of milestones to be passed, of achievements and attainments and progress along a path that the country chooses for itself. It’s a story of imagination and dreams. It’s a Scottish […]

The last four minutes

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: Wings Over Scotland In the end, we decided comment on this was superfluous. (Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 30 March 2016) . Michael McMahon, the Scottish Labour candidate for Uddingston & Bellshill, has been MSP for the seat (or its previous equivalent) since 1999.

Sajid Javid Deliberately Collapsed British Steel

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: Craig Murray The Conservative show of dashing home to look after the British steel industry is just smoke and mirrors. Savid Javid was fully aware it was being collapsed by subsidised and dumped Chinese imports, but argued that this cheap Chinese steel was beneficial to the UK economy more generally. Arguing against higher EU tariffs on Chinese steel dumping, Javid stated to MPs only six weeks ago “The responsibility of government is to look at the overall impact on British industry and jobs,” the Business Secretary said. “If duties get disproportionate it would have an impact in Britain and […]

Dispossessing the Sámi Peoples

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: Bella Caledonia The ancient forest of Białowieża – the last remaining primeval forest in the European lowlands – straddles the Polish/ Belarus border, and is the last home of wild European bison. It is now under threat from a Polish government decision to log more than 180,000 cubic metres. Meanwhile, the Finnish Government has unexpectedly brought forward to today a vote in the Finnish Parliament on a new Forestry Act that will enable it to engage in an unprecedented land grab that threatens the last old growth forests of Finnish Lapland and the reindeer herding homeland of the indigenous […]

Hindsight in reverse

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: Wings Over Scotland Kezia Dugdale gave an interview to Good Morning Scotland earlier today that viewed from above would probably look rather like the runway at Baghdad Airport in 1991. If we tried to pick out all the individual bomb craters in one post, readers’ eyes would glaze over long before the end. So we’re going to have to […]

Scotland: where opposition is another episode of amateur drama

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: NewsNet Scotland Commentary by Derek Bateman There’s a point in every storyline when your suspicions are confirmed. The plot twist may seem entirely improbable but you can’t shake that feeling in your gut. You go from: I think that’s it, to: My God. I was right. Usually that’s followed by incredulity. How did they get away with that… Derek Bateman For the last year and a half the case for the Union has had the same wobbly foundation. In fact it’s taken its cue more from Midsomer Murders than The Night Manager. One, if you’ve ever watched, is am […]

The Hateful 88

Speymouth March 30, 2016

Source: Wings Over Scotland When we ran this story on Monday, some of the press got rather upset with us. Even though we’d linked to the full data tables published on the ComRes site, Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden, for example, huffily tweeted a link to a cropped table suggesting that the real sample size was higher. And […]