The Renewable Energy Foundation sound like a nice lot, don't they? One imagines them funding labs full of researchers in white coats looking to make solar panels more efficient, or perhaps contemplating efficient grid connections for remote renewables projects to supply our cities.Instead, they're actually a pro-nuke and anti-wind lobbying group, made respectable by their name and nothing more. They're backed by the radioactive Ian Fells, who some have harsher words for, and the demagogue Noel Edmonds.
They're also hosting a conference next week, with Tavish Scott as the keynote speaker. Could this be related to the fact that his former MSP colleague Euan Robson has also taken REF's irradiated shilling? Surely the Liberals aren't warming up to go nuclear as the basis for another ill-conceived line of attack on the SNP?
Deal or No Deal is a very Lib Dem kind of a game-show. It’s make believe, nothingness wrapped up as something slightly clever, benign and mildly amusing. In fact, it is a myth of a programme (and a Party) masquerading as some sort of Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.
I think this is a lot like the Liberal Democrats in Scotland. They are a quantum superposition at constant fear of measurement. In this analogy the principles of both liberalism and democracy are the cat, whether dead or alive. And opening the box is the report of the Calman Commission. Until the box is opened, the Liberals are both a dead and an alive cat.
Of course the thought experiment was intended to highlight the absurdity of quantum mechanics, just as it demonstrates the absurdity of the Liberals. To be left wing and right wing, principled and unprincipled, in and out of Europe, for and anti referendums, supportive of half a nuclear submarine (or eventually half a power station I bet), democratic when it suits them and liberal until it gets hard, is to be the cat in the box. What is statistically significant is just how often when the box is opened on the Lib Dems, the cat is dead.