Wings Over Scotland

There’s a wonderful opening paragraph in today’s Courier that we’ll quote in full:

“The UK’S Energy Secretary has accused the SNP of employing ‘negative politics of fear and bullying’ as he warned bills could rocket by as much as £189 a year in the event of independence.”

That virtuoso display of Olympic-class irony from Mr Davey was part of the latest fearbomb from the No camp – Nick Clegg’s plea for a “Sunshine Strategy” apparently having been a casualty of Lord Robertson’s “cataclysm” – in the shape of yet another “Scotland Analysis” report from the UK government insisting that every single aspect of Scottish independence would be comprehensively and unequivocally disastrous.

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With the Scottish Parliament on a two-week break, it appears to have fallen to the Telegraph to take on the role of Johann Lamont this Thursday.

Scottish Labour’s regional manager has recently been under the curious impression that the most pressing issue on the minds of the people of Scotland is the fine detail of the First Minister’s hotel bill during a trip to America to promote the Ryder Cup in 2012, and the Telegraph seems equally obsessed.

But that dramatic splash isn’t quite what it seems.

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The one on the left is for these guys, the one on the right is for these guys.

We particularly like the Scotsman’s use of the word “error”, as in “Whoops, we totally accidentally rewrote this story three times in 24 hours, with four different headlines, in order to make it more and more pejorative and sneery. Tch, clumsy old us, eh?”

We had a couple of questions in our poll that were quite complex and involved, so to give people a wee bit of respite we threw in a little light-hearted one as well.

Q: If this was the referendum ballot paper, how would you vote?

That made some quite odd stuff happen.

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As well as asking the respondents in our latest Panelbase poll what they were thinking right now, we also invited them to have a shot at peering into the future – to be more specific, the future of the UK.

It’s fair to say that their predictions weren’t exactly overflowing with optimism.

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If it’s Wednesday, Labour must have changed their position on their future-devolution proposals again. Following our latest highlighting of the glaring contradictions in the shambolic “Devo Nano” plans, responses have started arriving to your letters.

If you’ve been listening closely, you’ll have heard that the position on whether the Scottish Parliament would be able to reduce taxes below the UK level has see-sawed from “No you can’t” (Johann Lamont MSP, 18 March) to “Yes you can” (Richard Baker MSP, 28 March) and back to “No you can’t” again (Tom Clarke MP, 4 April).

Well, guess what?

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Well, sort of, anyway. We were going to have another poll post tonight, but your eyes go a bit squiffy after an entire day of cross-referencing spreadsheets full of percentages so instead we’re just going to allow ourselves a wee brief glow of pride about this.

We hadn’t any idea the vote was taking place so we couldn’t even shamelessly urge readers to stuff the virtual ballot boxes, so we’re pretty chuffed to be sharing what we’re officially calling “joint 11th place” with some very decent reporters indeed, and to even be on the same list as the likes of Alex Thomson of Channel 4 and other people who get actually shot at for a living (instead of just on the internet) isn’t the worst feeling we’ve ever had.

And the fact that we’re the only other crowdfunded operation, along with the winner, means that you – Wings Over Scotland’s readers and employers – get the credit too.

Thanks to anyone who voted for us, and to everyone who’s helped make it happen.

Alert readers can’t have failed to spot that we’ve been devoting quite a bit of attention on Wings to Labour’s devolution proposals, chiefly because they’re by default the closest thing to the “more powers” option that’s so conspicuously missing from the referendum ballot paper at the insistence of the Unionist parties.

We’ve established that the party itself doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea what its own proposals are, and we’re still in the process of trying to get to the bottom of it. But as our latest Panelbase poll was “in the field” fairly hot on the heels of the launch of the “Devo Nano” paper, we thought we’d see what the Scottish people made of it.

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Depending on which opinion poll you believe, the number of Scots who haven’t yet made up their minds which way to vote in the independence referendum is anywhere between about 11% and 33%.

That’s a pretty wide range, and when we were pondering our latest Panelbase survey we thought it’d be intriguing to probe the Don’t Know demographic a little more deeply.

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If there’s one thing we – as a website rather than as part of the Yes movement – are sick and tired of hearing from Scottish people about the referendum it’s “We need more information”. Having spent two and a half years writing thousands of articles full of fully-sourced and referenced information covering every conceivable aspect of the debate, our response tends to be “You can’t be looking very bloody hard, then.”

But are we right to be so cranky, or are we just crotchety old grumpyfaces?

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The other (and more complete) view of this story from yesterday:

Remember, readers, when we were all over the papers as “creepy as f**k”, intimidatory “spies” for peacefully and non-confrontationally documenting alleged “Better Together” events with long-distance photos in which we carefully avoided publishing anything that could be used to identify any individuals?

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So anyway. Alert readers will have noticed by now that we’ve had a poll out, and earlier today we finally got the full data tables in.

It’s going to take us a while to fully analyse everything (though we’ve dropped a few tantalising snippets on our Twitter account, which many of you are now stylish enough to follow), but we’re going to start with a theme we return to often in our polls – trust.

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