Such was the outrage, felt by YES supporters at the overt bias in BBC reporting of issues in the Referendum , that hundreds protested last June outside the Corporation’s Glasgow headquarters on the Clyde. The much vaunted principle of political impartiality had gone missing in the BBC News
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The weekend message from the polls precipitated an unexpected and rushed recalibration of the Better Together Campaign which would not have been out of place in a Whitehall Farce. Had Nick Clegg dropped his trousers in Galashiels today, the picture would have been complete. However, for now
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The First Minister, Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling will meet again in a BBC Network Referendum debate tonight. Since the Kennedy/Nixon encounter of the fifties, television debates, in my view, have assumed undue and unproven importance in persuading the electorate. It is highly unlikely that five o’clock shadow
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Eclectic is scarcely adequate to describe the motley crew of celebrities, who were undoubtedly recruited by some bright, young Downing St sage and asked to tell the people of Scotland of their undying affection for the place and its people. A principal organiser was historian and TV
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Clackmannanshire has just about 30 000 people on the Electoral Roll and, in a 30% turn-out last Thursday, 1200 of them voted for the UKIP candidate, David Coburn. That’s something over 1 2% – modest but significant and worrying. I have lived and worked in this area for nearly
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Lord Trimble has warned that a YES vote for Independence in Scotland could destabilise the peace process in Northern Ireland as it may increase pressure for a similar referendum to be held there also. He did concede that the democratic movement for constitutional change in Scotland was a
Read more →It was always going to be a daunting, political problem to construct a coalition, capable of defending the Union in the Scottish Referendum. That it has failed so comprehensively, does not surprise many. I grew up in the cockpit of Northern Ireland politics but the vitriol there
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There is an amusing cartoon doing the rounds, where the characters speculate on the possibility of the Republic of Ireland rejoining the Commonwealth in the aftermath of last week’s State Visit by an t-Uachtarán, Michael D. I suspect that there are Georgian drawing rooms in Dublin where
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