M'lord George Foulkes

I've been reading George Foulkes' blog (I do it for you, you know), and I see that, way back in mid-March, he was complaining about being misquoted by SNP members like Alex Salmond. Salmond quoted him again in his speech to conference at the weekend, and I've put in that bit of the speech above wee Geordie's blog below so you can see how bad the First Minister is being to this peer of the realm.

I'm impressed by wee Geordie's courage in calling Joan Burnie a gullible fool, but slightly surprised that he doesn't know that the diarist in the Scotsman is Alba because, well, it's the Scotsman! Didn't that used to be Simon Pia? Anyway:

Salmond's bit from the beginning of his speech:

"Delegates, 'the SNP are on a very dangerous tack at the moment.'
"We are 'trying to build up a situation in Scotland where the services are manifestly
better than south of the Border.'
"Not my words, but the view from Lord George Foulkes in a recent BBC radio interview.
"And he was asked:
"'Is that a bad thing?'
"'No,' he replied. 'But they are doing it deliberately ...'
"Yes, delegates, our approach to government has been rumbled. He has found us out! We are deliberately making the lives of the people of Scotland better.
"Of course Lord George Foulkes thinks we are only doing this to upset the people of England. No George we are doing it to benefit the people of Scotland.
"Of course for some people south of the border, it has made them ask why their government isn’t acting in a similar way.

And the Complaynt of George (the spelling mistake is his):

Fri, 14th Mar '08 @ 12:19pm Deliberately Misleading
“Lies are half way round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
This applies to Alex Salmond’s selective misquotations from an Interview I did on the BBC’s Scotland at Ten programme with Colin Mackay. I pointed out that
services were better in Scotland but were not all done since May, many of them even pre-dated devolution.
But now the Nats are deliberately hyping them up and pushing them in the faces of the English to stir up discontent so they can ferment growing resentment between England & Scotland.
Now SNP propagandists are touting around the misquotation. First it has been picked up by bloggers, but now it is being represented by gullible fools like the appropriately named diarist Alba in the Scotsman and Joan Burnie in the Record.
It is sad that mainstream professional journalists like these no longer check with the original source – in this case the full transcript – before reporting SNP propaganda.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT…
LORD GEORGE FOULKES : “The SNP are on a very dangerous tack at the moment. What they are doing is trying to build up a situation in Scotland where the services are manifestly better than south of the Border in a number of areas.”
COLIN MACKAY : “Is that a bad thing?”
LORD GEORGE FOULKES : “No. But they are doing it deliberately I think to fuel resentment. They could do it without saying much - that was happening before devolution , before the SNP took over, quietly, but now it’s almost a “ya boo sucks look at what we’re doing…”, people in England are saying - hey wait a minute this our taxes, whether or not that is true - that is how they feel. I think the SNP are doing this in order to Fuel the case for independentce, by building up resentment ... “