Wings Over Scotland

On last night’s Scotland Tonight, prospective Scottish Labour deputy “leader” Katy Clark MP told the nation that “it could be Scotland that lets us down”.

It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. By “us” she meant the Labour Party, and she went on to elaborate, telling the old Labour story about how UK general elections are about an Old Firm-style showdown betweeen two parties and how it was in essence the duty of Scots to vote Labour to keep the Tories out at Westminster, seemingly unaware that just as with the Old Firm, most people despise both of them pretty much equally.

(And conveniently overlooking the fact that Scots voted overwhelmingly Labour in 2010 and got the Tories anyway, as Labour obstinately refused to consider a “rainbow coalition” because they hated the SNP too much. What Scots learned that year was that Labour would rather let Tories rule Scotland than be civil to left-wing nationalists.)

The comments followed just a couple of days after Holyrood Magazine editor Mandy Rhodes had penned an article about the Scottish branch’s current woes that had a very telling first paragraph.

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Alert readers will know that we like to keep you updated on the progress of our Freedom Of Information requests. Way back in May this year we sent one regarding the infamous unpublished opinion poll, and got a response the following month.

We weren’t very happy with it, though, and we followed it up. And today, just six months after the initial request, we got a final reply.

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One week after the independence referendum we posted about a fundraiser by the producers of Dateline Scotland. It was an unusual fundraiser, in that it didn’t promise to actually produce anything – the team simply wanted money to sustain them while they worked towards something much bigger. The fundraiser was a massive success, reaching more than three times its target in the blink of an eye.

And today the something bigger started to take shape.

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The Independent, 10 November 2014:

“Ed Miliband tried to persuade Gordon Brown to stand for the leadership of Scottish Labour, according to a senior party source.

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George Osborne on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning:

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As the Smith Commission continues its fundamentally pointless and impossible deliberations, in which it’s expected to digest and consider many thousands of submissions (including hundreds of detailed ones from political organisations and “civic Scotland”) in around three weeks, the Scottish and UK press is still casually and inaccurately tossing around the term “devo-max”.

There seem to be essentially two competing interpretations of the term – the previously-understood meaning (also known as “Full Fiscal Autonomy”) in which all powers are devolved to Holyrood except foreign affairs and defence, and a new one which simply refers to whatever devolution Westminster is prepared to grant. (Justified semantically by the claim that it’s the maximum devolution Scotland’s going to get.)

So when we commissioned our latest Panelbase poll, we decided that rather than the usual checklist of “which powers should be devolved”, to which the answers have remained the same for years, we’d ask some slightly different questions about the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, and the process of devolution itself, to see if we could determine what it is that the people of Scotland really want from their Parliament.

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When we commissioned our latest poll, the candidates for the Scottish Labour sort-of leadership hadn’t yet been finalised. In fact, we’re not even sure whether the post of deputy “leader” was up for grabs at that point, with Anas Sarwar having said that he had no intention of stepping down, shortly before stepping down.

But in any event we thought it’d be much more interesting to see who people actually thought should be the leader, rather than just who they regarded as the least-worst option out of whoever put their head above the parapet and took on the least attractive job prospect in Scottish politics.

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As part of our latest Panelbase poll, we wanted to explore the so-called “2017 Scenario” hinted at by new SNP leader and First Minister-elect Nicola Sturgeon, whereby the Tories control the UK parliament, the SNP have another majority at Holyrood, and the UK holds a referendum on the EU where England/the rUK votes to leave and Scotland votes to stay in.

To that end, we asked two key questions. Our findings are below.

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We try to deploy the money that generous readers send us during our fundraisers very carefully, so we were annoyed last week when we commissioned a new opinion poll from Panelbase with a few thousand quid left over from the Wee Blue Book campaign, only to have every other pollster and his dog release the results of their own surveys the very next day.

So sadly (for us) the following figures won’t have quite the dramatic impact that they might have commanded otherwise, but they’re still pretty interesting, particularly in the context of how they relate to the findings from Ipsos MORI, YouGov and others.

(Our poll also covered some ground that nobody else has done, but to add excitement and build a little suspense we’ll save that for a wee bit later on today.)

Let’s get to it, then.

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Earlier today we published an email from Daily Record editor Murray Foote about “The Vow”. In it he referred to an editorial published in the paper on 8 September, attacking the “confused” and “shambolic” position of the three Unionist parties on further devolution to Scotland in the event of a No vote.

The infamous “Vow” was their response. When publishing it on 16 September, two days before the referendum, the Record announced on its front page that “NOW VOTERS CAN MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE”, thereby implying that “The Vow” had delivered what the 8 September editorial had demanded.

Readers can judge for themselves.

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Disappointingly, we haven’t received a reply from Daily Record editor Murray Foote to our email yesterday inquiring into the provenance of “The Vow”.

However, an alert reader who wrote to him yesterday did. You can read it below.

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