Wings Over Scotland

It seems safe to say that the SNP’s de facto defeat of the fox-torturing lobby today has riled the right-wing commentariat beyond their endurance. Unable to get their way and inflict a prolonged, agonising death on small animals for “sport”, Tory columnists have instead descended howling and bloodthirsty at pack strength on their readers.

Here’s just a small sample.

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This:

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As part of their tireless campaign against abuse and threats on the internet, the Mail’s ever-alert reporters will doubtless be wanting to run a major piece on the deputy leader of UKIP calling today on a widely-read website for Nicola Sturgeon to be killed.

No need to thank us for the tip-off, guys. All part of the service.

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There’s little to gladden the heart of a left-wing Scot like a Tory squealing in outrage that he won’t be allowed to torture woodland creatures to death for “sport” any more.

So this site is thrilled by the announcement from the SNP that they will, after much speculation in the media, vote against (and therefore likely condemn to defeat) the UK government’s plans to relax England’s fox-hunting ban to a point at which it would be de facto repealed entirely.

And not just because foxes are a lot cuter than Tories.

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The Scottish Daily Mail today leads with a screaming banner headline announcing in its trademark style that, according to a poll it commissioned with Survation, Scots are massively opposed to any income tax rises when Holyrood eventually gets power over the rates under the new Scotland Bill.

And the reason that’s weird is that we commissioned a poll on the very same thing just days before, and got a dramatically different answer.

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Yesterday we listed some of the nastier items from George Osborne’s horrifying 2015 budget that Labour had said they wouldn’t be opposing, including the public-sector payrise freeze, the reduction in the benefit cap and the slashing of child tax credit for families with more than two children.

On a BBC hustings debate today, Yvette Cooper extended the list.

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Our latest Panelbase poll was conducted from 26 June-3 July, before this weekend’s astonishing events involving Greece, which are currently being documented on Twitter under the hashtag #ThisIsACoup.

We’re going to ask the exact same question again in our next one, so we can see if the EU’s actions have caused any significant change in public opinion. It should be pretty interesting either way.

The insulting thing is that they think it so soon.

There’s a key aspect of their job they seem to have forgotten.

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The Economist:

“George Osborne’s political vision is brave, bold – and on many counts wrong. 

Cutting benefits to the very poor while reducing inheritance tax for the wealthy is indefensible.”

The acting leader of the Labour Party:

Of course, it’s entirely natural that the Labour Party and The Economist should be on opposite sides. But somehow everything seems to be the wrong way round.

One of the worst things about running this website is that eventually it causes you to doubt the existence of reason. Things happen that – even putting all partisanship to one side, in so far as is humanly possible – it’s impossible to believe any remotely rational being or organisation would ever think, say or do.

A recent obvious case in point was the election of Jim Murphy as Scottish Labour leader. SNP supporters rubbed their eyes in disbelief as Labour and the media rushed, with apparent sincerity, to proclaim one of Labour’s most right-wing and divisive MPs the party’s saviour.

So unable was the nationalist side to contain its glee and amusement at what was a plainly suicidal move to anyone sane, the Unionist establishment persuaded itself a bluff was afoot and that the laughter masked fear. We all know how that turned out.

But what we want to talk about in this article is how, no matter how often that same tragi-comic farce is played out – in 2007, 2011 and now 2015 – the astonishing fact is that it never seems to make any difference. In defiance of the most famous quote attributed (apocryphally or otherwise) to Albert Einstein, Labour and its cheerleaders keep right on repeating the same actions over and over, expecting different results.

For those of us who cling to reason as the hope of mankind, increasingly despite all the evidence, it can cause outbreaks of incredulous despair. “They just CAN’T be this stupid!”, we exclaim, only for Labour to prove us wrong by offering their long-suffering Scottish members a prospective dream team of Kezia Dugdale and Gordon Matheson.

But we may have had a modest epiphany.

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Because our recent Panelbase poll shared a sample with one for the Sunday Times, there was an unasked-for bonus in the data. The ST had asked Panelbase to divide the 1002 Scottish residents into those born in Scotland, those born in England and those born elsewhere (including the rest of the UK).

The paper has a slightly unsavoury track record for doing so, and it did it this time for the sake of running a deeply statistically-iffy question aiming to prove that a lot of Yes voters were anti-English, but we’ll get to that in another article.

What that meant was that we were able to cross-reference the “ethnicity” data against all of our questions, and that resulted in a couple of interesting findings.

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