Scottish Political News

Info from AllMediaScotland and last nights Newsnight suggests mibbes aye...

"BBC Newsnight Scotland last night wheeled on the big guns - Magnus Linklater, Scottish editor of The Times, and Douglas Fraser, Scottish political editor of The Herald - to mull over the media’s growing impatience with the news vacuum being created as a decision is awaited from the Electoral Commission on the ‘dodgy donation’ to Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour Party leadership campaign.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Labour hierarchy has been embarking on a charm offensive with Scottish journalists, at pains to point out that Wendy has the full backing of all her fellow Labour MSPs - aimed at dampening down rising speculation that former Health Minister, Andy Kerr, is preparing to take over as leader should she stand down."

The consensus was that there are rumblngs and disquiet about the Constitutional Convention and 'Devolutin Max' and - laughably - the notion that Alexander is 'a closet nat'.

"However, as Andy Nicoll, the political editor of The Scottish Sun, succinctly told Newsnight Scotland, the wooing of the media by Wendy’s supporters had merely produced “cack-handed media management”.

In the Daily Telegraph, Kate Devlin, its Scottish political correspondent, has stressed the importance of the Daily Record appearing to turn against Alexander, evidenced by "an excoriating editorial comment” on Monday. Pointed out Kate: “It is the loss of support from Scotland’s most stridently Labour newspaper that will concern the leadership.” In its editorial, the Daily Record declared: “No one could have predicted how far fortunes would slump in just nine months. And they only have themselves to blame. They have made too many mistakes”, adding: “If Alexander can’t even get them back to where they were less than a year ago, there is simply no hope she will ever become First Minister.”

With Hain gone now Conway away the culture of cosy cronyism that has protected the Alexander Siblings may be coming to a close.

Go here and open the BBC player to look up Newsnight Scotland and watch last nights show.

* for overeseas visitors the record not displaying blind devotion to Labour is a media event in itself.

If there is a musical act I like more than Radiohead, it is Autechre. The release of Autechre’s new album, Quaristice, bears some resemblance to Radiohead’s attention-grabbing In Rainbows release. It also bears a lot of the hallmarks of my predictions / observations about the apparent future of the music industry which I wrote about earlier this month.

I has already been known for a while that a new Autechre album was due out on 3 March. But on Tuesday it was announced via an email to subscribers to the Warp Records newsletter that Quaristice was available to buy as a digital download immediately.

This is the second time in as many months that Warp has sprung a surprise. They did it last month by releasing Clark’s Throttle Promoter EP with no prior warning, along with the announcement of a new album, Turning Dragon, just a month away. It is a pleasant change given that Warp seem to like announcing an album several months in advance and switch the publicity machine into overdrive (and the recorded music industry wonders why people just illegally download albums instead of waiting).

Of course, I had to buy it straight away. Unfortunately, Bleep was struggling to cope with demand. After spending far too long trying to get the zipped download to work, I eventually resorted to laboriously downloading the album track by track. The whole process took over three hours. Ironically, it would have been a lot quicker and easier — not to mention cheaper — to just illegally download it.

On top of the immediate digital release, a limited edition version of Quaristice was announced. This is interesting because Autechre have never had a ‘limited edition’ version of one of their albums released alongside a standard edition. I don’t know if that was because Autechre didn’t like the idea or if Warp thought it wouldn’t be worth it. But whatever, this move seems to back up the observations I made a few weeks ago — the limited edition is becoming much more important for the recorded music industry.

The limited edition Quaristice sounds swish. It comes with a second CD of alternative versions of tracks from the album housed in a rather luxurious-sounding package:

The double CD set comes in a Designers Republic styled, photo-etched, 0.4mm steel slipcase with foil blocked inner gatefold wallet.

It comes at an equally luxurious price — £24.99. And postage is £5! Limited to 1,000 copies, it sold out really quickly, so I feel lucky that I didn’t hang around like I often do. I speculate that they could have easily sold 5,000.

The MP3s cost £6.99 (if I had opted to go for the lossless Flac files (which I didn’t because they are not iPod-compatible), it would have cost £8.99). As such, I have spent £36.98 on Quaristice — almost as much as the £40 Radiohead ‘discbox’.

Before In Rainbows I had never spent anything like £40 on an album. Now I have done it twice in the space of a few months. What a sucker. Who said it was impossible to make money from recorded music any more?

All-in-all, it is a very clever move by Warp. I have bought every Autechre album that’s ever been released for around a tenner. With a couple of sly moves they have managed to just about quadruple that. And judging from the trouble I had downloading it and the fact that the limited edition sold out so quickly, it has happened at least a thousand times over. The accountants at Warp must be happy today.

(Needless to say, I will be reviewing Quaristice when I get the chance.)

It’s hard not to have some liking for Andrei Lugovoi. The affable — and unflappable - ex KGB agent cuts quite a figure with his perma-tan and pistol-toting antics the news networks so love to repeat. Add to this a bored insouciance - often approaching but just stopping short of belligerence — concerning the poisoning case which made him famous, and you have just the sort of snook the British love to see snooked at authority. A degree of respect somewhere closer to grudging than unconditional is, I feel, surreptitiously paid him by many in this isle. (more…)

  Superintendent Brett Lovegrave:

"Last year's Glasgow airport attack proved Scotland isn't immune to the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, it isn't a case of 'if' there will be an attack on Edinburgh but 'when'.

"... It is important not to be complacent. Just because Edinburgh had not been attacked doesn't mean it won't be. However, I don't have specific intelligence that Edinburgh is going to be the next target."  

This follows Strathclyde Police chief Stephen House making similar comments.