Wings Over Scotland

Watching the Six Nations rugby tournament every year is usually quite a dispiriting experience – not just because of Scotland’s invariably underwhelming performances (broken up by the occasional false dawn), but because talking about it on social media always results in an extremely tedious flood of comments about how rugby is a sport played and watched exclusively by middle-class Tory No voters.

(That’s Scotland skipper Greig Laidlaw there, with Wings mascot Hamish.)

Speaking as someone whose interest in the tournament (in the pre-inflation days when it was the Five Nations) was first sparked when my extremely working-class Bathgate comprehensive school started taking pupils to Murrayfield in the 1980s – 50p for the bus and 50p for the match ticket, which got you a seat on wooden benches actually on the grass – this attitude has always instinctively felt like complete nonsense.

So when we did our latest Panelbase poll during this year’s competition, we figured we may as well actually find out.

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The Foreign Secretary in September 2018:

And after an apparent change of heart in March 2019:

What an absolute Hunt, eh readers?

Today is International Women’s Day, and we wouldn’t normally pay much attention to that fact because this is a Scottish politics website, not a feminist one. But the Scottish Government is currently putting itself at odds with women in a way it would have been hard to imagine when Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister, and since what Wings does specialise in is hard data – and at the request of a lot of women – we thought it was worth putting some solid numbers on a few things in our latest poll.

There wasn’t much ambiguity about them.

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Scottish Labour’s 2019 conference, which starts in Dundee tomorrow, isn’t taking place in the most auspicious of circumstances, to put it kindly. The branch office is trailing a breathtaking 22 points behind the SNP in the latest Holyrood polling, 8 points behind the Tories, and the gap is getting bigger.

Westminster polling isn’t a great deal better, with the SNP 15 points ahead despite having been in power for 12 years and doggedly attempting to commit electoral suicide with a raft of increasingly unpopular policies (more on that to come).

Donations have shrivelled to under £36,000 in the last year. (For perspective, the 2018 Wings fundraiser made over £153,000.) The North Britain branch has shed a fifth of its membership in a matter of months, has had to give away conference passes for free to try to fill seats, and is embroiled in a bitter spat over its EU policy.

So it’d be a tough time to be Richard Leonard, if anyone knew who that was.

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While we dig deep into the results of our latest Panelbase poll, we thought we should update you on the progress of this story from last month.

A few days ago we received a reply from the Information Commissioner’s Office, and as a result have sent a letter to the Conservative Party’s compliance department. You can read it below.

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We’ve just got the tables from a new Panelbase poll back, and they make grim reading for Labour (North British Branch Office) on the eve of their conference.

Holyrood voting intentions (constituency):

SNP 41% (nc)
Con 27% (+2)
Lab 19% (-4)
LD 8% (+2)
Grn 3% (nc)
UKIP 2% (+1)

(1002 Scottish voters, 2-6 March 2019)
Changes from December 2018

That’s getting perilously close to the all-time low of 14% achieved around the tail end of Kezia Dugdale’s disastrous leadership. And the list vote isn’t much better.

Holyrood voting intentions (region):

SNP 36% (-2)
Con 26% (nc)
Lab 19% (-3)
LD 9% (+2)
Grn 6% (nc)
UKIP 3% (+2)

But even with astonishing leads of 14% and 10% after 12 years in power, the SNP have nothing to be complacent about either – according to the Weber Shandwick seat projector, these numbers would give Nicola Sturgeon’s party 57 seats and the Greens just 4, meaning Holyrood’s pro-independence majority would be a goner and the Nats would need backing from at least one Unionist party to pass any bills, meaning no new mandate for an indyref.

Like everywhere else, Scotland is currently split down the middle and nobody knows which side of the tightrope it’ll fall off in the event of a push.

(Full series here.)

Self-propelling brain vacancy Alex Cole-Hamilton might have just recorded the shortest ever reign at the top of our Thickest Politician In Scotland rankings, but you can’t keep a proper idiot down for long.

It probably goes without saying that none of the above is even a little bit true.

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Lordy, is it that time again already?

Let’s leave aside the most toweringly and obviously cretinous aspect of that insanely illogical claim for a moment – namely, if the McCrone Report was such a smoking gun proving independence would be bad, why did the UK government suppress it for 30 years rather than sending a copy to every home in Scotland and shouting it from the rooftops every single day? – and just quickly look at what it actually said.

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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In today’s Times:

Yeah, you read it right. He really said it out loud.

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Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.