Robin McAlpine speaking for everyone with a brain here. I suspect the SNP's position is going to be very significantly worse by the end of this month, never mind 100 weeks into the future. https://t.co/T5Vh5pEEanrobinmcalpine.org/scotland-backw…
I share Robin's editorial frustration too. I'm bored writing what is essentially the same article- the SNP are malicious, incompetent and uninterested in independence - repeatedly. I might even follow his example and take this week off. But until people see it, we're stuck.
As long as indy supporters are willing to let the SNP kick the can down the road again and again and again and again - "Oh, things will be clear after Brexit/COVID/the cost of living crisis/the convention/the conference/the election" - we're all wasting our time.
Almost all analysts worth a damn now reckon the SNP is spiralling rapidly towards something close to wipeout at next year's election. But everyone's just sitting around waiting until the building is burnt to the ground before they dial 999.
"Oh, but what's your answer?", they bleat. "The SNP is the only vehicle we have that can deliver independence!" And it looks increasingly like they're going to cling to that hopeless fantasy until the vehicle looks like this.
And at THAT point maybe they'll admit that we need to melt it down and start again, but we'll have pissed an entire decade up against the wall by then, because people were too cowardly to face a horrible reality: Nicola Sturgeon has destroyed everything the SNP ever achieved.
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So, @firstdirect are a bunch of dickbags. I've banked with them for 25+ years, but last week I was in Sainsbury's buying some milk during a Bear Patrol and my card got declined. I rang them up, and after over an hour on hold, they told me all my accounts had been cancelled.
These were my personal current and savings accounts, not the Wings one, which is with a different bank. It obviously came as something of a shock - this was ALL my money - so I asked why on Earth such a thing would have happened, and they point-blank refused to give any reason.
They claimed to have sent me a letter - normal post, not Recorded Delivery - two months previously (which I'd never seen), and also an email which I didn't get either (I checked my spam filters, nothing) and which they acknowledged was marked on their system as unread.
There's STILL no report from yesterday's NEC meeting on the SNP members' website. Usually up almost immediately. Screenshot taken two minutes ago.
I mean, it's not like they get much info - it's usually one paragraph saying "Squealer praised Napoleon for the successful delivery of the Eighteenth Glorious Three-Year Plan", but if they can't manage even that then things are looking grim.
This, for example, is the entire report from the 18 March meeting.
I met Ruth Wishart, fleetingly, once, at a Yes event in Shawlands a few days before the indyref. Having grown up reading her in the Daily Record, I went up and introduced myself, saying what a fan of her work I'd been. Reader, she looked at me like something she'd trodden in.
There are a lot of people who REALLY don't like me, for one reason or another, and I've met many of them in person. But I swear to God I've never seen a look of such horrified distaste on anyone's face as I did that day.
I skulked off back into the crowd like my own granny had just told me she hoped I'd die in a chemical fire.
I'm afraid this is a load of shite. Funnily enough, just yesterday I'd noticed that the last few issues of FHM (2014/15) were still available on Readly, and I had a look over them with a committed feminist of my acquaintance.
FHM's motto was "It's great to be a man", and it did its best to uphold it. And that certainly did involve a lot of scantily-clad ladies on the front cover. (Compare to modern-day Esquire, which is an almost totally female-free zone.)
But there was surprisingly little of that inside. (Not NONE - check out the extraordinary photographic aesthetics on this very saucy shot of Helen Flanagan, and the pics of "the world's sexiest behavioural psychologist" - but a pretty small proportion of the pagecount.)
I mean, how would this - going ahead with "the big players" only - work? Would you still have to pay the deposit in wee shops, but only be able to reclaim it at big ones? That's a disaster for the wee shops.
Or would you NOT have to pay it at wee shops, in which case you could buy stuff cheap at the corner shop but then claim the non-existent deposit back at Tesco? Massive wealth redistribution, I like it! Tesco not so keen.
Or are they only talking about producers? In which case you put those producers who are just on the wrong side of the arbitrary line at a massive disadvantage compared to those who are just on the right side of the line?