Wings Over Scotland

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.

It is in no sense whatsoever an argument for Scotland staying in the Union, because it’s completely irrelevant to the Union, except in so far as that the only reason Scotland needs to borrow money at all is because it’s been part of the UK for the last 40 years and has been left impoverished as a result while a very similar neighbouring country has become wealthy beyond imagination.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Michael Gove has been saying some words today, to the general astonishment of all.

Which seems like a good time to bring up some more data from our latest poll.

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It’s been a very sluggish few months in Scottish politics news, with only the significant but rather dry matter of the Brexit power grab to talk about, so you’d imagine that the publication earlier this month of some important new statistics concerning the Scottish economy would have raised some media attention.

Yet fully three weeks after the figures were released we can’t locate a single word of coverage from any newspapers or broadcasters, and that’s odd.

After all, whenever some economic figures pop up showing Scotland in a bad light – especially when some financial thinktank has also passed comment – the press isn’t usually slow to jump all over them, so oh wait we see what’s happened here.

Perhaps go and take a look for yourself. Because you’ll grow very old waiting for the Scottish press to tell you about it.

After 27 unbroken pages of royal wedding “news” (following on from a full 46 in its Sunday edition), the Scottish Daily Mail finally gets down to reporting other stuff today.

“Union support rising”, eh? Do we have any numbers on that?

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To the best of our recollection, today’s Sunday Politics Scotland was the first time a representative from this site has ever been invited onto a BBC Scotland TV show to discuss the affairs of the day since Wings was founded back in 2011. So we thought we better capture it for posterity in case it’s another seven years until the next one.

The bits that didn’t make it to air are below.

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A couple of weeks ago Scottish Labour announced, to the traditional merriment, its commitment to greater federalism for the UK, as it has done every year since 2011 or indeed since 1910. (Sometimes under the equally-meaningless term “Home Rule”.)

In today’s Sunday Times, the much-missed former SNP spin doctor Kevin Pringle also pondered the idea, concluding that he could get on board a federal Scotland in the UK under certain conditions:

So in our poll of English voters last week, we thought we’d ask their opinion.

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Our poll of English voters has already revealed that, on balance, the people of England would be happy to ditch Scotland, Northern Ireland and (very narrowly) Gibraltar as the price of Brexit. But what about if we approached the idea of England’s independence the other way round? We thought of that too.

If England was already independent, its electorate would (by almost 3 to 2) be happy to join up with fellow Leave voters in Wales, but only fractionally over half of English people would want to enter a union with Scotland if they weren’t already in one.

(To be fair, they’ve already had most of the oil, so we’re not quite as attractive a bride as we once were.)

Considerably fewer fancied taking on Northern Ireland, but fairly substantial minorities were keen on the idea of entering a sort of mini-EU with one or more of France, the Netherlands and Belgium. English people are weird. But it certainly appears that an awful lot of them think that the UK has had its day and they’d rather just go it alone.

Super-alert readers may also recall that in our first ever Panelbase poll, way back in August 2013, just 18% of Scots said they’d vote for a union with England if Scotland was currently independent, with 55% saying no. Looking back on the past 300 years, it looks increasingly like hardly anyone thinks it was such a great move.

Well, the timing of this is rather unfortunate.

If only someone had said something, eh?

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As alert readers will recall, this week we commissioned Panelbase to poll the good people of England, and we got some answers that we think will blow your minds. But we’re going to start with one we suspect people will find sad, but all too predictable.

Many will remember bitterly the short-lived “lovebombing” campaign from the indyref, in which a list of semi-celebrities from the rest of the UK was assembled to assure Scots of how much they were valued and cherished by their UK partners.

Four years on, not so much.

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Just before we (thankfully) stop talking about this insanity entirely, one last thing.

This month, just for fun and a bit of a change, we’ve commissioned a Panelbase poll NOT of voters in Scotland, but our neighbours to the south. English folk are always complaining that in a world of UK devolution nobody speaks for them and them alone – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own Parliaments, but not England.

So we polled 1020 English people (and we do mean English – we restricted responses to people who were both resident in England and were born there) about all kinds of things. Many were related to England’s relationship with Scotland and the rest of the UK, but while we were there we figured we might as well ask some other stuff too.

And as the UK parliament hotly debates Leveson 2 and press freedom in general, it seemed a pertinent time to re-ask a question which in polling invariably unites people of every colour, creed, class and persuasion across the entire UK, and which might be the only political policy anywhere in the UK which comes even close to matching the mass popularity of Scotland’s now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act.

It’s this one:

English people love the Queen, but not as much as they love this idea. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, Tory, Labour, homeowner, tenant, worker, student, it makes no difference. Overwhelming majorities of every single demographic support putting an end to the ridiculous situation that newspapers can get away with blaring an untrue story all over the front page (and pages 2, 3, 4 and 5) in gigantic screaming type, and then print the correction in a microscopic corner of page 23 two months later.

It’s just about the only thing that totally unites Remain and Leave voters – our poll found identical responses (79% for, 5% against) among those who want Brexit and those who want to stay in the EU.

It’s simple, practical and costs nothing. We can’t for the life of us work out why nobody is prepared to offer it to the nation. If any party wants to actually win the next election, we’d suggest sticking it on the front of the manifesto and preparing for a landslide.