SNP accused of monkey business

Scottish Labour were today demanding a full inquiry after it was dramatically revealed that a senior Scottish National Party MSP had laid on spectacularly lavish hospitality for an unspecified number of baboons whilst on an overseas jaunt.

The clandestine lunchtime banquet, which reportedly included large quantities of bananas, was revealed in an indiscreet tweet by SNP MSP for Glasgow, Cathcart, James Dornan.

His message also includes a cryptic reference to having a "good day" while entertaining a party of as yet unidentified primates at a secret location in the separate African nation of Uganda.

The Davidson Disasters

Ruth Davidson - Toffee Hammer of the Scots

At the moderately over-subscribed tête-à-tête that was the Scottish Conservative Party's conference in Troon last week the Scottish Tories' ex-leader in waiting peeked out from behind David Cameron just long enough to stake her claim to lead the fight to deny Scotland independence. With all the fanfare an asthmatic kazoo duo might muster she launched her own wee campaign groupette called, according to her press release, Conservatives Friends of the Union (CFU). Although they perhaps understandably prefer to leave out the "Conservatives" bit as much as possible.

BBC lies!

I think this speaks for itself. Clear evidence of the BBC's anti-SNP bias and blatant dishonesty.

Air raid warning!

 English 'would bomb our airports'

Such is the dire warning from former Lord Advocate and Solicitor General, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, as reported by The Herald. This has to be the current leader in the Scare Story Stakes being run by the anti-independence parties and their mouthpieces.

With His Lordship joining Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, Lord Caithness and, of course, Baron Foulkes of Cumnock, my entrepreneurial instincts are alert to the possibility of a small but potentially lucrative market in ermine-trimmed strait-jackets.

Never forget, however, that even as we laugh uproariously at such inane drivel there are all to many British nationalists reading this and nodding their heads in sombre appreciation of Lord Fraser's sage and timely warning.

Trust me! I'm a doctor!

Trust me! I'm a doctor!

"By contrast the SNP government has come up with a single proposal and has drafted its minimum unit pricing bill so narrowly it has shut down other ideas." - Dr Richard Simpson

Richard Simpson gained notoriety for playing fast and loose with the facts as part of the British Labour & Unionist Party's opportunistic attacks on the Scottish government at the time of the release on licence of convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi.

Coincidentally, one the most blatant lies being peddled at that time also related to numbers as Simpson sought to deceive the public by insisting that the medical report submitted in support of Mr al-Megrahi's application for compassionate release was the work of a single doctor.

Fine words

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created at TagCrowd.com

I thought this analysis of Alex Salmond's address to the SNP Spring Conference in the form of a tag cloud was quite interesting. Particularly in view of a recent spate of suggestions in blogs and the media that he was "going soft" on independence.

Tweeting for tossers

I see society's self-appointed tut-tuterati of the Twittersphere have been at it again! Responding with not at all cunningly contrived righteous indignation and impressively theatrical outrage to something some fool tweeted about "our brave boys" in Afghanistan.

It seems that the tosser in question might have some tenuous connection to the SNP. So, of course, some other tosser (Jim Murphy) feels compelled to elevate the tosser of the first instance to the rank of official party spokesperson. Such is the manifold nature of tosserism!

Baillie and the blankets II - The retraction

Smeared by Baillie

The average person could hardly have missed reading about the latest allegations of failures in Scotland's health service made by Labour's health spokesperson, Jackie Baillie. They could, however, be forgiven for having failed to notice the bit where she retracted her latest lie. While the claim that patients in one hospital were being forced to "share blankets" was given headline treatment across the media, finding the admission that this claim was entirely false might have challenged a professional researcher.

The initial response to her smear attempt being challenged came from a spokesman for Ms Baillie and compounded the original lie by seeking to suggest that the hospital concerned was involved in a cover-up. It is only in an obscure and unrelated piece in The Herald that we find a grudging admission of dishonesty tacked on to yet another rehashing of the original untruth..

The plain fact is that we cannot trust anything that the British Labour & Unionist Party says. And we can't even rely on our newspapers to hold them to account for their lies.

Baillie and the blankets

Jackie Baillie - lying for Britain

It's party conference season in Scotland and that necessarily means a plethora of speechifying and even more poring and pondering in print and pixel over the content of said oratorical offerings. Pundits, commentators. journalists and bloggers will spend countless aggregate hours in minute examination of our politicians' offerings like priests poking through the entrails of some sacrificial animal seeking portents - and, for the most part, finding only the crude makings of a pudding.

Too many chiefs...

Charles Kennedy

The anti-independence campaign may have no clear proposals or rational arguments, but they certainly aren't short of "leaders". Here's yet another one auditioning for the job. And while Kennedy has no more to offer than any of the others in terms of a vision for Scotland, he has certainly established his British nationalist credentials with a litany of hypocrisy, distortions and negativity.

And dishonesty, of course. No claim to leadership of the campaign to preserve the corrupt and anachronistic union could be valid without a proven ability to spin a lie. Kennedy covers this section of his job application with a snide attack on the First Minister and what he refers to as Salmond's "relentless need for self-promotion". By which he actually means his stubborn refusal to just shut up and go away.