Lies, Damned Lies and Labour

In the stunningly beautiful Western Isles six brand new schools have recently been completed or are nearing completion, including a replacement building for the famous Nicolson Institute. All six are due to accept pupils by the start of the new academic year in October 2012.

The outgoing council was responsible for the commissioning of the schools and senior members have begun quoting the concurrent completion of all six schools as a triumph in their re-election literature. The schools building programme has become highly controversial, however, due to the decision to build all six schools in parallel. Here is what happened.

A Very Reasonable Supposition

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Call Kaye on BBC Radio Scotland. The subject for discussion was the launch of the 'Friends of the Union' as part of the Tory conference in Scotland. With the customary impartiality of BBC Scotland, listeners were asked to call in if they were friends of the union, and to explain just why they were feeling so friendly.

By this time of day, I was already enjoying my third mug of strength 5 coffee, so I felt reasonably up for the challenge. After 15 minutes of listening to various reasons why Scotland was still too wee, too poor and too stupid to survive alone, I finally picked up the phone and dialled in. The usual slightly bored researcher answered and took my name, location and number.

“And what would you like to say?”, she asked.

Nocturnal Unionists Fiddle Scotsman Poll

Yesterday Evening, 5^th April, I was reading a story in the online version of the Scotsman. It was a rather pointless little piece about the leader of the Western Isles council and how he had opined that the SNP would not do as well as they expected to in the May elections. The comments were almost universally antagonistic to the content of the piece, so I refreshed the page a few times over the next couple of hours, just to see what else might appear.

While reading the comments, I noticed the online poll which was on the subject of “Should the independence referendum be brought forward from 2014?” It was running at about 61% No vs 39% Yes - much as it had been for several days.