And no, we don’t even mean the FOUR spelling mistakes in this 42-word tweet.
We mean the bit that we’ve highlighted above in blue. Because what Scottish Labour’s lowest-watt bulb was gloating about earlier today was that Lord Bracadale concluded there’d been no gap created in the law by the Kelly-driven abolition of the OBFA.
And that’s… well, that’s not quite what Lord Bracadale said.
We’ll keep this one brief, because it’s a bank holiday. We asked our Panelbase poll of English voters this month who they thought – regardless of respondents’ own politics – was doing the best job of leading their party. These were the results, in descending order of perceived competence:
4. Theresa May (Con)
Net rating: -18 (34% well, 52% badly, 14% don’t know)
5. Jeremy Corbyn (Lab)
Net rating: -19 (32% well, 51% badly, 17% don’t know)
Not a single net positive, and it seems particularly telling (and grim) that the two at the very bottom of the list are the only ones with any chance of actually becoming Prime Minister – pending, Lord have mercy on us all, the arrival of Jacob Rees-Mogg – while the top two don’t even sit in the UK Parliament.
(Foster, in fact, doesn’t currently sit in ANY parliament.)
To be honest, readers, it’s a miracle British people bother to vote at all any more.
Like most Scottish politics nerds we’re going to be spending the morning absorbing the report of the Sustainable Growth Commission. But while we do that, we’ve got more data from our Panelbase poll of English voters earlier this month, on what Scotland could expect in the future if it stays in the UK.
We told them: “Under a system known as the Barnett Formula, the government spends more money per head on people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than it does on people in England, because their populations are more thinly spread so it costs more money to provide the same services.”
Of all the dishonest memes regularly put around by the Unionist side in the Scottish constitutional debate, the most bare-faced is the notion of the “fiscal transfer”. Part-time pretend economists harp on endlessly about how the UK “transfers” money (the current popular figure is £9bn) to Scotland to balance the books every year, as if it was a munificent gift out of the sheer kindness of Westminster’s heart.
The reality, of course, is that it’s a loan, which Scotland has to pay back with interest. If an independent Scotland ran a deficit – like almost every country on Earth – it could take that loan out from any number of possible lenders and carry on as normal.
But still, let’s indulge them for a moment and assume there really is a £9bn hole in Scotland’s finances. Is there anything we could do to reduce the size of it significantly? Well, since you ask, we have some poll data on that.
The phrase “the Labour Party has gotten itself into a catastrophic mess on [X]” is a sentence you can complete with almost any subject these days, whether it’s Brexit or anti-Semitism or anti-Asian racism or factionalism or Venezuela or just about anything else under the sun, so it should be no surprise that its gender policy is no different.
The party’s stance regarding all-women shortlists is now that men can be on them, so long as they say they’re women, with no questions asked, except when Labour decide arbitrarily that they aren’t really women at all because they’re obviously really men, except for all the other occasions when they’re obviously really men.
Which seemed like a timely moment for some more new poll data.
Last week we revealed that English voters would happily see Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK if it was the price of securing Brexit. But one of the odder things was that those figures included a sizeable number of Remain voters, who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.
We were a little perplexed, so we did a follow-up question asking those people if they’d elaborate a bit and got some interesting replies. One person, for example, answered “The Scottish people are very arrogant and although they want to be separate from the rest of the UK they are happy to take money from England”. Charming.
But there was also another stream of opinion on the subject, and it was revealed in the responses to another question in the original poll.
