Page 7 - Derek Ball News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

THE Tory press repeats nauseously that Douglas Ross won a seat in the Scottish Parliament. Mr Ross did not win a seat, he was awarded a seat under the quirky d’Hont system that penalises the party who won 62 of the 73 (a massive majority by any standards) seats available in the direct vote for people who actually faced the electorate. It was the SNP’s massive majority in the regional vote which allowed Ross to slip in through the back door. Mike Underwood Linlithgow I WAS fascinated by the story of Douglas Ross’s meltdown during a Westminster committee meeting (Ross calls SNP MP...

ONE of the more important things about Ian Blackford standing up and delivering his speech is that it is beamed unedited worldwide. All those news outlets that congratulated the spectacular independence majority in Holyrood will have been watching, and I rather think that Johnson knows that – hence he did not answer! Well, that, and he is a petulant, spoiled man child that has never, at a guess, had the word “no” directed at him. Johnson cannot cope with defeat, he cannot cope with having to do the will of others, and certainly does not register in his overly privileged Oxbridge m...

letters The division will not go away or be 'healed' without a resolution to the reasons why that division exists IT is demonstrated once again that Scotland is broadly evenly split on independence. The opposition parties exploit this by maintaining that division. Their problem is that they fail to understand that a split of opinion like this can never be resolved while fact-based reasonable opinion remains untested. What they are promoting instead is that because the split exists, we are going to impose the status quo regardless. If that split was more polarised there is a case for tha...

HAVING listened for weeks to the First Minister defend Scotland’s vaccine roll-out because it was apparently “falling behind”, I was amused to see that, as of Valentine’s Day, England was behind Scotland in administering the first jab. As Jason Leitch points out, it is not a race and this is an entirely frivolous statistic, but I doubt any politician or journalist will be asking Boris Johnson why England is “falling behind”. It is only the devolved nations that can be considered to “fall behind”, after all – England is always world-leading! Eyes roll, shoulders shrug, we...

P Davidson Falkirk THE SNP drive to overwhelmingly win the 2021 Holyrood election is more important than the egos and aspirations of any individual or of any internal factions. There has been a lot that has happened with the SNP that should not have happened. That is not to take sides but to emphasise the point that the collective aim of winning this election is the most important cause, and the reason for the SNP’s existence. Every other issue, irrespective how any individual may feel, is of secondary importance. To further emphasise the point, I have a number of friends who are no...