As the polls close in the Scottish independence referendum, here are a selection of topical jokes that you are very unlikely to have heard on Radio 4's The Now Show.
They might be Frankie Boyle jokes. Or they might not be. Probably the latter...
Hearing the independence vote is going to be incredibly tight. So definitely Scottish then.
How many Scots does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. From Thursday they will be back to candles.
Alex Salmond needs to find a way of keeping voters out of pubs and get them into the polling stations in Glasgow on Thursday. The police helicopter is gonna be busy .
I asked Abdul next door if he thought Scotland should be independent. "Of course they should," he said, "what right has a minority group living there got to try and make them live by their rules and culture. It's disgraceful."
I was talking politics in the pub with a Scotsman today and he said, "They can stick their referendum where the sun don't shine!" I replied, "Er, it's already being held in Scotland mate."
There was a further setback for the Scottish Independence campaign today. The Loch Ness monster has stated he's relocating to the Lake District in the event of a Yes vote.
I thought that Alex Salmond had a huge chip on his shoulder but I now realise that it's his massive potato-shaped head.
The Scottish Referendum. The NO campaign has had a huge boost as Greggs the Bakers threaten to quit Scotland if they gain independence.
A poll of people in London on Scottish independence has been released. 25% think Scotland should vote no to independence. 25% think Scotland should vote yes to independence. And the rest of London don't give a toss so long as they follow England towards being an Islamic state.
If Scotland gains its independence after the forthcoming referendum, the remainder of the United Kingdom will be known as the "Former United Kingdom" (F U K). In a bid to discourage Scots from voting 'yes' in the referendum, the Westminster has now begun to campaign with the slogan: "Vote NO, for F U K's sake."
Huw Edwards may personally be a Unionist (that's the accusation I hear, although I haven't seen it), but he certainly displayed some blind partisanship earlier. At the end of his vox pops group (I caught only the last segment, 3-2 Yes), one guy said he voted No because all he heard were promises of utopia with nobody really explaining how it was all going to be paid for and how it would work. Edwards scolded him by saying that was a bit of a "caricature". Yet all but one of the three Yes voters said their reason for support was that it would be a fairer society and all that. So did the Yes guy at some bookstore gathering. In other words, except for one woman, all Yes supporters gave their reasons for voting Yes was because they wanted the utopian fantasy Edwards dismissed as a caricature.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to keep watching for a couple hours just to see if this is a trend. Except I will have to drink rather heavily to put up with Polly Tuscany and Owen Jones.
Also, Huw Edwards clearly implied that anyone who had already decided which side they were on before the last few weeks of campaigning was not open minded and did not have an opinion worth considering. Perhaps that's true of the Braveheart/Trainspotting voters, but anyone with half a brain could see long ago that, aside from the idea of independence in the abstract, Salmond and the Yes crowd were promising a fantasy they couldn't possibly deliver.
ReplyDeleteOh, sorry, Edwards said that's a caricature.
So far, after the Dundee result, it's6-1 No. If the final result is No, with something like a 5% margin, expect the BBC to say it was super close, the tiniest, most narrow of victories, even though it's a wider margin of victory than their beloved Obamessiah got in 2012, which they declared gave Him a solid mandate to do what He liked.
ReplyDeleteHuw Edwards sounded crushed by the strong No victory in East Lothian. And then Stirling No right on top of it. He may be a Royalist, but he gets noticeably more downbeat with each No result. We'll see what his reaction is when one of the big councils votes Yes.
ReplyDeleteOh, Christ. Judging from what I just heard, the one negative coming from a No result is a big one: the BBC will say that Gordon Brown saved the Union.
ReplyDeleteHuw and Nick Robinson have been pushing the influence of Gordon Brown on the result just now.
DeleteThe only thing I would say in Robinson's defense is that back in the early days of the financial crisis, when Mr. Brown swept himself into the spotlight claiming to have organized the entire world into propping up all the banks and saving us all from Bush's disaster, Robinson quite openly rolled his eyes (figuratively) at that on his blog. So I'd guess he really does think Mr. Brown had real influence.
DeleteAccording to the polls, most No voters, and even most Yessers, had their minds made up already - for whatever reason - before the last two weeks of hysteria kicked in. The final result, except maybe in Glasgow and a couple other places, was a larger margin than that. Remember, we were told everything is too close to call. No way anything he said made such a huge difference. Hell, his own council area was a solid No. I'm not buying that Gordon Brown is somehow the only politician in the country isn't just another elite trying to rule from afar. Why is his own Chancellor one of those, but not him?
Plain and simple, more Scots weren't buying Salmond's promise of a socialist utopia, where there was no more poverty and everything was "fair". We need to find out how many No voters really did want an independent country, just not one based on obvious fantasy and zero guarantee on how it would affect people's savings and buying power in the immediate future. Even Galloway understood that.
Correction: that should have been "his own council was *barely* a solid No."
DeleteGlasgow's Yes margin was only 25,000 votes. It's over. Britain is saved, for the moment.
ReplyDeletePhew!
ReplyDeleteAndrew Marr and Nicola Sturgeon were both stressing that this was a vote for change, that the million+ 'Yes' vote is one that has to be answered. Andrew Marr said that this is what democracy demands. Hopefully the tens of millions of English, Welsh and Northern Irish voters will now be listened to as well.
The BBC is predicting 55 No v 45 Yes. Andrew Neil just pointed out that, if that's the final result, it's a much larger margin than the pollsters were predicting just prior to the vote, and that the pollsters would be another set of losers tonight.
ReplyDeleteJohn Curtice, Scotland's only pollster (it seems), was remarkably cautious too hedging his bets long after most others were calling it for 'Yes'. He stuck with the 'tight race' line for a remarkably long time. When Clackmannanshire declared for No at 1.30am (54% no, 46% yes), he said "Clackmannanshire is a relatively small part of Scotland and we should not place too much weight on the result."
Yes, and every time another of the first few areas announced a No result, somebody would remind us all that it was an affluent, older area.
DeleteI have to say I wasn't convinced either about all the neat explanations about particularly areas voting the way they did. There was a lot of supposition there.
DeleteIt's often the way. You will doubtless recall that European election in the aftermath of the Iraq War where the BBC studio pundits/reporters kept explaining the incoming results as being part of a trend of anti-government protest votes against the Iraq War. On and on it went - from the UK to Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc - until the results from France and Germany came in and were similarly anti-government. Both of those governments opposed the Iraq War. They were put down as being anti-incumbency votes by the BBC pundits/reporters. They didn't bat an eye-lid.
I didn't see the BBC's coverage, so can't say. But I definitely recall the next European election after the financial crisis. It was when voting shifted a bit to the right in many places. The Beeboids were very concerned about the unfortunate direction Europe seemed to be taking. Mark Mardell was still the European opinion-monger at the time, and he openly expressed his astonishment that everyone wasn't rushing to embrace Socialism after Capitalism had clearly - to him - failed.
DeleteWill the neverendum be a neveragaindum?
ReplyDeleteAs Alex Salmond has hinted: “for the time being....”
Oh well, he's resigning now.
DeleteIt's the only speech he's given so far where he wasn't telling lies about what was going to happen.
Delete