scotlandisdifferent

Here is the text of a complaint I raised with the BBC on 29th August: I write to complain of bias in tonight's BBC Two Newsnight programme on the resignation of Alex Salmond. There were two interviews in this programme. The first was a factual statement of background events by your correspondent David Grossman, and the second was a highly coloured rhetorical piece by David Clegg claiming that Salmond's resignation had split the SNP apart. Where was the third piece, claiming that the resignation was a shrewd political act that takes the pressure off Nicola Sturgeon? You gave only one side of the story - that's the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is that you ignored what surely is an even more startling and newsworthy aspect of this story, which is the speed at which the crowdfunder raised the money. By 10.30pm, when you went on air, the appeal had raised £32,000, or 64 percent of the £50,000 which it was asking for over 28 days. Not to have includ...

RECENT CONVERSATIONS and internet posts have left me with the feeling that the independence argument is in fact won, and the ice-sheet of No that's been stifling the hopes of younger generations is beginning to crack and break up. First up is the dog-walker, whom I reported on earlier , who had a visceral hatred of nationalists because of what they were doing to the country he loved. Leaving aside the question of why loving one's country isn't nationalism, this man is trapped in circular, content-free thinking: - I love my country. - How do we know you love your country? - Because I want it to stay in the UK. That's where it belongs. - How do you know it belongs there? - Because it does. And I love my country. This isn't political or social thinking, this is emotional masturbation. And the problem for these people at the high end of the No scale is that, when faced with facts or concrete thinking, they have nowhere to go: they can only retreat into vitriol. There...

This claim turned up in comments on The National yesterday, from John Stuart Wilson. Since it's based on data, it needs to be taken seriously: Our largest on-shore private sector employer is the finance industry. It accounts for, directly and indirectly, 1 in 12 jobs. It doesn't want to be located in a foreign country from 90% of its customers. (Ask yourself: how many local authorities and SMEs currently send their monthly pension scheme payments to Belgium to have them managed there?) And it will not accept the loss of a LOLR [lender of last resort] backstop. So independence will cause major job losses in Scotland, as these firms relocate to the rUK. However, there are a few points in the above claim which are not clear: - the Scottish finance industry employs 160,000 people, out of a labour force of 2.6m. This is 1 in 16. Where does the writer get his figure of 1 in 12 from? - the UK-wide finance industry employs about 2m people, out of a labour force of 32m. So the Scottish...

Dear Seymour, You won't know this, because you decamped to Europe after the Brexit vote, but between the Byres Road and our house, in Glasgow's West End where you and your wife courted by dreeping aff back-court walls, there has now opened a CHURROS BAR to speed the weary WestEnder on his homeward walk from the boozerie. The prices are extortionate! Ten fried doughnut sticks (two portions, five sticks each), wee pot of chocolate sauce, plain cardboard-box kerry-oot ("Sorry, guys, we're closed for eatin' in, it's nearly ten o'clock") - the price for this is NINE PRE-BREXIT SMACKERS, would you believe!? That's nine Maybot vouchers as we speak, or fifty-seven Maybot vouchers by the time we get to next week, and three thousand two hundred and fifty-six point three Maybot vouchers by the time we leave the European Union. Not a problem for us, because we're old and rich - one of us is nearly in the grave, and as for the other one, I'm not always ...

Wow, this needed to be said, and here it is! This is a statement on the Catalonian referendum issued on 25th October 2017 by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. I show the link above, but I quote the statement in full anyway at the foot of this post. The statement makes four main points, exposing the logical fudges used by those who support the Spanish government. These points are also highly pertinent to the Scottish situation, and we need to think of ways of addressing them. The four main points are: The right of self-determination belongs to the people, not the state, and the state cannot take it away. The right to self-determination overrides the principle of territorial integrity. Using force, making a referendum illegal, and annulling autonomy violate international covenants on civil and political rights. Dialogue and negotiation are the way forward. The constitutional settlement for Scotland violates the first of these four points: we can...

A while ago I reported on a mild-mannered, middle-aged dog-walker who accosted me insultingly while I was walking back from the dentist wearing an SNP badge. Today I went to the same dentist again, wearing the same SNP badge (it lives on the coat, stupid!), and lo and verily behold, same spot, same dog, same guy, same tactic, same spiel. He stopped as he was walking past me on the bridge over the Kelvin, made eye contact, said, "That's a shame!" and waited. One thing that will have occurred to readers already is that it's not a good idea to regularly accost strangers when you walk your dog, because they're likely to be the same people as you accosted when you last walked your dog. As they were in this case. Another thing that might occur to you is that if you're going to accost the same stranger again, you could do yourself a favour by recognising them, which he obviously hadn't. So I told him that he'd tried that trick on me before. He showed no reac...

The Catalonian referendum result was astonishingly pro-indy: 91% pro-indy, on a turnoutof 42%. If all those who stayed away had voted, it would have needed 79% of them to vote anti-indy to produce a 50-50 result. Hands-down win for indy, no question. It is of course true that we don't formally know the voting intentions of those who stayed away - that's what staying away means. But we can make some reasonable assumptions: Some of them were dead, or had moved house. All electoral rolls are out of date: in December 2015, 9% of the entries on the electoral rolls of the UK named people who were no longer there (Electoral Commission) , and the Spanish registers will be comparable. So 9% of the alleged abstainers don't in fact exist, and to get a 50-50 result, we actually need not 79% of those who stayed away, but 87% of them, to vote anti. Some preferred not to be clubbed to bits by a cop dressed in a wall of plastic armour. Everything we know about human nature suggests tha...