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It'll take a long time to eventually come to court and when it does do it will be all over the media, but in between there will be next to nothing to report and so it will be pretty quiet. It will be in the back of people's minds but there won't be any opportunity for political opponents to make any capital out of it - at least not publicly. It would have been best for the SNP if this had never happened. Second best for them would be if it dragged on until after the next HR election. Absolute worst would be if the trial coincided with that.

If true, that seems against natural justice. Reminds me of a mate of mine who back in the 80s at the height of football casualism got done for resisting arrest. He'd been involved in a bit of soapy bubble in the east end of Glasgow, had nipped down a lane for a piss just after, when some bloke tried to grab him from behind. He lamped him and as he fell back, his jacket fell open, my mate saw the radio and realised he'd just hit a plain clothes copper. Got charged with police assault, the various things the copper he'd hit had seen him doing earlier and resisting arrest. Got the usual kicking at the station for those times and a weekend in the Bar-L followed by an appearance in court on the Monday morning. Plead not guilty to all charges and at trial got off with them all bar resisting arrest for which he got a slap on the wrist fine. Afterwards he was raging, going on about how could he be done for resisting arrest when he shouldn't have been arrested in the first place as he'd been found not guilty of anything. Someone then pointed out to him that he had actually done all they things he'd got off with and his response was "I know, but I was found not guilty".

Minimum. To give you an idea of another high profile case. Tommy Sheridan was charged with perjury in December 2007 and was found guilty in December 2010 and the trial took 11 weeks.

No chance of that happening. I can't see a trial of this nature starting this year and when it does start it will probably go on for weeks.

That is surprising although irnbruman said it was on the Herald facebook page. Just had a quick shoofty at the Herald and it looks like comments have been disabled on some but not all related articles.

I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see reports of people being arrested and charged with contempt over the next few days if only to try and put a stop to it. The Crown Office put out a specific warning earlier in the day, it would be strange if they didn't act on it.

There's a few reasons. The Expenditure side of things is pretty straightforwards, you total up the budget of the Scottish Government, Scottish Councils and UKG expenditure directly in Scotland. The part - and it's significant - is that portion of general UKG spend that isn't spent directly in Scotland but is allocated to Scotland, e.g. the cost of the FCO. The revenue side of things is a lot more complicated - for the reasons you mention - and I can't see how its something that could be measured any more accurately than at current without Scotland being independent, its certainly not something the SG could do unilaterally under the current devolution settlement. Then there's the fact that before the drop in oil price, the SG was very vocal in using the GERS figures to highlight that Scotland was contributing more in revenue than it got in expenditure. Arch unionist, Merryn Somerset Webb actually wrote an article in 2014 about how you couldn't trust the GERS figures which funnily enough was deleted a couple of years back from her website. If they ditch GERS now because aspects of them are now difficult they would rightly be accused of dropping them because they looked bad. The likelihood is that the UKG would continue to produce them - or something similar - so it's not as if they'd go away. The short answer is that the SG Isn't capable of producing its own GERS report as it needs the input of the SG and dropping them entirely would cause more problems than it would solve. For the foreseeable we are stuck with them. The two obvious and uncontestable points are that GERS is based on Scotland's position within the UK, firstly it does not reflect the position of an independent country, the whole point of which would be to make different choices and do things differently. Secondly, if the outcome of 300 years of union and Westminster rule has resulted in Scotland being an economic basket case unable to stand on her own two feet, that doesn't say much for the current arrangements.

Not just the media - also extends to Twitter, Facebook and football message boards. Just Saying like.

You got a source for that?

None of that is untrue. It doesn't mean that Corbyn is a political genius either.

So we've gone from Scotland being a subsidy junkie to Scotland subsidising the UK, neither is true. If the UK crashes out without a deal, the impact will be largely as you describe, irrespective of whether or not Scotland is part of the UK.

Do you want to have a go at explaining that?

Sometimes it isn't all about Scotland. If anything it's all about England.

I don't see that happening, not this side of a general election, it may happen after a Tory loss though. FPTP post makes it very difficult for any new party to make headway in terms of seats. It's very unlikely that Corbyn could win a general election at present on the other hand though its highly likely that May would lose and the only option - given how battle lines are draw would be a "grand coalition" of the other parties, providing C&S support for a minortiy Labour government. I just plugged the numbers into the Electoral Calculus website, using the Poll of polls from Britain Elects - which has Labour on 37.8% and the Tories on 37.4% - and the last full Scotland poll on Westminster voting intention, which was the YouGov poll from a couple of weeks back. It gives the following prediction, change from 2017 in brackets: Con - 284 (-34) Lab - 280 (+18) SNP - 45 (+10) LIB - 19 (+7) PC - 3 (-1) Green - 1 (0) NI - 18 (0) For those interested, the 10 SNP gains are: Tories;, Bill Grant, Colin Clark, Luke Graham, Stephen Kerr ; Labour, Hugh Gaffney, Martin Whitfield, Paul Sweeney, Lesley Laird, Danielle Rowley, Ged Killen. By my reckoning that leaves Ian Murray as the last man standing for Labour in Red Morningside.

With the exception of doing nothing and letting the Tories tear each other apart - which tbf, is probably the right course of action, can you give any examples of actions that Corbyn has taken to close the gap? Doing nothing in this case is hardly the work of a master political strategist though. Any Labour leader that had his party behind him would be miles ahead given the current clusterfuck that is Brexit and the Tories. IN his own way he is every bit as intransigent as May is, probably more so.

That's a total non-starter and is a case of a drawing woman clutching at straws. The biggest fundamental problem for her is that it would be overturning the will of the people in two referendums, one in NI and one in the ROI that ratified the GFA.

Correlation doesn't necessarily equate to causation. I'd say in each of those cases the reason is more to do with what Theresa May and the Tory party have done rather than anything that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have done.

Your answer is here - https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question-time-s-audience-producer-really-fascist

Although the whole red-lines part is a bit nonsensical in essence what they are asking is what areas are you prepared to compromise on and that's a fair question. What Dianne Abbott should have done was frame the answer in such a way that it becomes about what does Labour think is important. That's pretty much what Kirsty Blackman did. The problem for Dianne Abbott is that either Labours position isn't capable of being clearly articulated or that they know it will be very unpopular with their wider membership and support.

I agree that a deal was done with the allies - with the exception of the Soviet Union - on Speer, but to me he was a self serving shit who would say whatever would save his skin. It was ridiculous to think he wasn't aware of the holocaust and in fact after his death it came out that he was fully aware.

I don't remember this myself as I was too young but in the early-mid 1970s, Speer gave a series of interviews on the BBC where he basically denied all knowledge of any of the bad stuff, claimed he had no influence and was basically only an architect. The thing you have to understand about Speer around the time the World at War was produced was that Speer was a bit of a celebrity. He'd been released from prison, written his memoirs - which obviously didn't show him in a bad light - and was on the chat show circuit. He was basically trying to present himself as the "good nazi" and was making a living off that, It's really hard to believe now. At the time Clive James was a columnist for the Observer and I've read - and I think I've still got somewhere - anthologies of his columns from the period and he completely shreds Speer. Of all the people interviewed, I think Speer is the least trustworthy as he had the most to hide and the most to lose.

Probably one for the unpopular opinions thread but since I've watched the original series as a kid and to this day! I've always had a bit of a thing for Traudl Junge, I think it's her accent more than anything else. i read her autobiography a while back which was interesting but she did overplay the "I was only the secretary, not a nazi" part. its a great series and one that if I spot an episode on, I'll usually watch.

You mean rape.

You think they'll need another one?

Isabel Oakeshott was also heavily involved in Leave.EU, the Aaron Banks, Nigel Farage unofficial campaign, that was up to all the dirty stuff with Cambridge Analytica and the like, something she likes to try and keep as quiet as possible these days. She had all the emails about Leave.EU and Banks's links to Russia but sat on the, until the Observer got a hold of them.