Wings Over Scotland

Honestly, they should put ribbons and a bow on this stuff.

Last week the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine – a figure often singled out for criticism by both Unionist parties and the media – came under fire once more for a column she’d written in the Daily Record, in which she questioned the motivations behind Labour’s desire to devolve more power away from the Scottish Parliament to local councils.

It’s a point this site was making as far back as 2012. Scottish Labour have given up on any hope of winning a Holyrood election in the forseeable future – the latest poll of Scottish Parliament voting intentions puts the SNP on over 50%, to Labour’s 26% – so the party has suddenly discovered a passion for local devolution that it oddly chose not to enact while it was in control at Holyrood for the best part of a decade.

But McAlpine’s point that Scots tend to trust the Scottish Parliament more than any other elected body was immediately misrepresented as an attack on hard-working and honest councillors. Yet the reality is that there’s an empirical measure of democratic accountability (and therefore trust), and it’s a measure in which Holyrood unarguably comes out on top.

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There’s a curious piece in today’s Herald, which we can’t be bothered linking to, in which ubiquitous pundit David Torrance makes a whole series of almost entirely inaccurate speculations about the motivations behind our Panelbase poll from last week. (Torrance, of course, is the commentator about whom Alex Salmond wrote an amusingly sarcastic letter to the same paper pointing out that despite appointing himself the former FM’s “biographer”, he didn’t know him at all.)

We didn’t announce beforehand that we were conducting the poll. Had we been greatly surprised or disappointed by its findings, we were under no obligation whatsoever to make all or any of them public. We could have cherry-picked only the ones we found most favourable to our cause – like the fact that Scots want to stay in Europe while the rest of the UK wants out – or simply pretended the whole thing never happened.

(The money was already spent. We don’t get a refund if we keep the results secret.)

David Torrance didn’t bother asking us why we’d commissioned the poll, but instead wrote a column based solely on his incorrect assumptions. Which is odd, as in so far as the very little we’ve conversed with him, we’ve done so cordially, and were happy to post him his own print edition of the Wee Blue Book when he asked last year, even despite past incidents like this.

We’ve always been happy to provide mainstream-media journalists with quotes when asked. So we’d just like to remind Mr Torrance that our Twitter account is here, our Facebook page is here, and our contact form is here. We’re not hard to reach. If he wants to know why we did something or what we think about anything, all he needs to do is drop us a line, rather than make stuff up and get it wrong.

…is eternal vigilance, chums. Turn your back on Unionists and the media – for the sake of argument we’ll say that’s two things – for a second and they’ll start trying to slip lies out into the public consciousness, from which place they’re notoriously hard to dislodge. (Kim Jong-Un’s mythical Scottish restaurant is a recent case in point. It’s now a comedy staple, despite having been completely fabricated.)

So it’s always worth keeping a close eye on this site’s dear old pal, Labour candidacy hopeful and media favourite Duncan Hothersall, for an early sight of which falsehoods the party will be trying to propagate next.

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Some readers have been a bit dispirited by the findings of our Panelbase poll this week, which revealed a few quite socially-conservative views among the Scottish population and also found fairly small differences of opinion between Scots and the rest of the UK on a number of issues.

But to be downhearted about the findings is to miss a whole series of points.

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Chris Cairns is on holiday.

Alert readers may recall this baffling story from last month, in which we discovered that Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie hadn’t been able to think of any more pressing issues to occupy himself with than finding out how many times Scottish Government civil servants had accessed Wings Over Scotland in the six months leading up to the referendum.

So we were intrigued when we got an email from a viewer who just for fun had sent a Freedom of Information request to Holyrood and asked them the same question for the official Scottish and UK Liberal Democrats websites. The results are below.

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So far in our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK we’ve found that while there can be very sizeable gaps between Scottish public opinion and that elsewhere, it mostly tends to be within the same side of the debate – for example, rUK citizens are much keener on retaining the monarchy and nuclear weapons than Scots are, but Scots do still favour both.

Our final round-up off the poll findings, though, focuses on the three questions we asked where the differences DID cross the divide.

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For our next grab-bag of data from our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK, let’s take a look at some things where Scottish people converge and diverge from their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts. It’ll be something to do.

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We apologise if the results of our twin social-attitudes polls of both Scotland and the rUK have been a little depressing so far, readers.

Depending on how you choose to look at things (and where you live), this next tranche of data is going to either cheer you up a little bit or make you feel even worse.

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Having found to our dismay that both Scots and the rest of the UK want to see people prosecuted for offensive but non-threatening comments on Twitter and Facebook, it seems a good time to reveal the rest of our findings on matters of law and justice.

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Freedom of speech has been a very hot topic across the world in the wake of the brutal murder of 12 editorial staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and other related killings. So in our latest poll we thought we’d find out how committed people were to the principle, even in much less deadly situations.

The results were sobering.

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