2012/05/02 20:07
Tomorrow (Thursday the 3rd of May 2012) there will be local elections in all council areas of Scotland.For the second time, it will be held using the Single Transferable Vote, which basically means we're being asked to rank the candidates.In East Renfrewshire, last time the result was Labour 7, Tory 7, SNP 3, LD 1 and Independents 2, and the...
2012/04/08 11:57
In my spare time, I'm a member of the Eastwood constituency branch of the SNP.I have just created a website for the branch.It's nothing special, just a nice little site based on WordPress.
2012/05/06 20:36
The SNP did really well in Thursday’s local elections, gaining 61 extra councillors (compared to 46 extra for Labour), with these gains mainly coming from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
East Renfrewshire is actually quite typical in this regard: Labour 8 (+1), SNP 4 (+1), Tories 6 (-1), LibDems 0 (-1), Independents 2 (n/c).
However, if you’ve been watching the BBC, you’d think the SNP actually had a bad election. To achieve this negative image, they’ve had to doctor the figures, so instead of comparing the number of seats with the last election — as is the norm for reporting elections — they’ve decided to to compare the number of seats with the status quo ante bellum, which helps Labour immensely because they were hit by numerous defections of councillors to the SNP over the past few years.
According to the BBC, Labour therefore gained 58 seats compared to 57 seats to the SNP, and they then turn this into a story about Labour doing significantly better than the SNP. Of course they also conveniently focus more on these figures than on the absolute numbers, which are 424 SNP councillors compared to 394 Labour ones.
To reinforce their version of events, the BBC have been focusing strongly on Glasgow (where the SNP admittedly were too ambitious and thus didn’t gain quite as many seats as hoped, increasing their number of councillors “only” from 22 to 27), and been ignoring the parts of the country where the SNP had an excellent election, such as Dundee, which now has an absolute SNP majority.
The BBC’s biased reporting is not just affecting the SNP, but also the other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. They increased their number of councillors from 8 to 14, but this has been more or less ignored by the BBC.
This anti-independence bias has to stop now! The BBC are supposed to be impartial, and surely that should apply in Scotland as well as in England.
2012/04/30 23:30
Fraser Nelson has written two articles, one in The Telegraph and one in the Spectator Coffee House, about the way the UK is disintegrating politically.It's of course old news that the SNP are dominating Scotland politically, but England is also increasingly separating into areas that are very different politically -- basically, Labour are big in the north of England and in London, the LibDems are big in the southwest, and the Tories are big elsewhere.Although he doesn't mention it, this...
2012/04/23 23:59
I don't seem to be able to embed this, but it's essential viewing for anybody interested in Scottish independence.It's an interview with Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Liberal party of Canada.It's neither for nor against independence, but he's making some apt comparisons with Canada and Quebec.
2012/03/27 23:01
The SNP are often asked to provide detailed plans for what to do after independence -- which currency would Scotland use, would there be passport controls, would Scotland be a member of NATO, etc.To a certain extent that is right...
2012/03/20 23:35
Tavish Scott and some of his unionist friends have been having fun recently suggesting that Shetland and Orkney might separate from Scotland in the case of Scottish independence.As far as I can see, there are theoretically four options for Shetland...
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