Wings Over Scotland

Governments, of all political stripes and nations, are often accused of being control freaks bent on constructing and enforcing a “nanny state”, where citizens’ freedoms are arbitrarily curtailed under a pretence of it all being for their own good.

Things from banning smoking and routinely snooping on private emails to forbidding people from wearing certain types of hats or expressing unpopular opinions (or even popular ones simply deemed unacceptable by a self-selecting elite) are justified for all sorts of social and economic reasons.

But where, if anywhere, should the line be drawn?

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The phrase most repeated by angry Unionists in the 16-and-a-bit months since the independence referendum is surely “once in a generation”. While the SNP quietly gets on with the business of government, having not mentioned a second referendum in its 2015 manifesto and not being expected to do so in this year’s either, the parties of the UK can’t seem to shut up about it.

The Tories in particular seem determined to make “NO SECOND REFERENDUM” the main plank of their 2016 election campaign, despite nobody actually proposing one.

(This is happening despite Ruth Davidson having said just nine months ago that her party wouldn’t block a second indyref, while Ed Miliband said that Labour would. However, Davidson’s organ-grinder, David Cameron, joined Labour in ruling it out just a few months later, which may explain Davidson performing a sudden U-turn akin to her famous one over more devolution.)

And when you boil it down to the brass tacks, what that means is that the parties of the Union want to hold the Scottish people prisoner.

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The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.

But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.

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Remember the scary old days, readers?

Thankfully, Scotland voted No and pensions were saved forever.

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The Labour Party has today published Margaret Beckett’s report into why it lost the 2015 general election. We were rather struck by this line:

Let’s just go over that one again to be sure: Labour believed that an SNP victory in Scotland would make it “impossible” for the Tories to form the government.

Which is weird, because that’s not quite what we remember them saying.

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During the independence referendum campaign, we catalogued numerous breaches of the law for which the “Better Together” campaign was let off with a slap on the wrist, from data protection to running unlicensed lotteries. Today several papers report that the official No campaign has been fined £2000 by the Electoral Commission for failing to document £57,000 of its expenditure during the campaign.

Alert readers will no doubt recall the explosion of glee from Unionists in the press and on social media last October when this site was fined £750 for being late with some of its own documentation, and we assumed that much the same thing had happened with BT, but on closer examination the story appears to be rather different.

Rather than simply missing the deadline for providing receipts or invoices for specific items of spending, “Better Together” appears, going by the report in the Herald, to not have accounted for the money at all.

And that’s slightly concerning.

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Thanks to the Scottish Daily Mail, we’ve just spotted a piece by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin for City AM a few days ago. We had an inordinate amount of trouble getting the full article to display past the site’s incredibly over-zealous advert enforcer, so we’ve preserved it for posterity here.

There’s a gem in every paragraph. You’re going to like this one.

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One of the most frustrating things about the independence campaign was when people tried to put policies before principles. The point of Scotland being independent, as we pointed out in the Wee Blue Book, isn’t so that it can install any particular political party in government or pursue any particular political direction. It’s simply for Scotland to be able to choose those for itself, not have them imposed on it against its will by the people of another country.

To that end, we’ve often published poll findings that show Scots holding views that are at odds with our own (eg on the death penalty or workfare), because it’s always worth remembering that you have to persuade the electorate you have, not shout angrily at it in the hope it’ll become the electorate you WISH existed.

If you insist that independence must mean Policy X, you run the risk of needlessly and wrongly alienating people who support independence but might not back Policy X. It’s something that’s always worth keeping in mind.

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Okay, we’ll make this quick.

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We listened to an interesting chat on Good Morning Scotland earlier today (it’s right at the start, just after the news) featuring Gerry Hassan and the sharp New Statesman reporter Stephen Bush, which briefly discussed a curious political phenomenon of the 2000s where people said they liked certain policies until they were told they were Tory policies, at which point their opinions changed.

It put us rather in mind of a classic 2000AD comic strip called The Ballad Of Halo Jones, and in particular a short episode from it about a character called The Glyph, which seemed to us to sum up the current dilemma facing the Labour Party on both sides of the border – but especially in Scotland, as was rather strikingly illustrated by a revealing interview with Kezia Dugdale on Friday.

So we thought we’d share it with you, because sometimes pictures say a thousand words. Especially if there are several of them and they also have words on them.

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With little in the way of news to chew on, the Scottish political blogosphere has begun to eat itself of late, with an exhausting number of articles on popular sites about how an SNP list vote is a wasted vote and anyone thinking of voting for the Nats in both constituency and region is a deluded cultist/simple-witted idiot (mostly written by candidates/supporters of other parties who are often not identified as such), and now some angry pieces from disgruntled SNP supporters making the opposite point.

All are based, from one perspective or another, on opinion polls and seat predictions based on those polls, some of which appear to be based on very shaky premises.

We’ve already broken down the mechanics of the Scottish electoral system at very considerable length, so readers will be relieved that we’re not going to get into that again. Instead, we thought we’d take a very specific region-by-region look at the scale of the task facing the fringe parties.

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For ages now it’s been nagging at us that there wasn’t a quick and easy reference point for all the opinion polls we’ve commissioned, listing all the subjects covered by each poll and linking to both our own analyses of the figures and the raw data tables for people who wanted to go delving in amongst the stats themselves.

So now there is – it’s here. (And in future you can easily locate it under “Polls” in the menu bar running across the top of the front page.) We’re off for a bit of a lie down.