Wings Over Scotland

One other thing struck us about the YouGov poll for the Sun we mentioned earlier today. It recorded voter responses by both how they voted in 2010 and how they plan to vote in 2015, and the numbers were drastically different.

If  for the sake of argument we regard the Lib Dems as still being very broadly on the (relative) left of the UK political spectrum, and the emergent UKIP as obviously on the right, we get a rather chilling result.

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Vote No in 2014 and one of these three could be your nation’s leader:

The full data tables are here. In them you’ll learn that just 6% of Labour voters think Ed Miliband is “strong”, only 13% of Conservative voters think David Cameron is “in touch with the concerns of ordinary people”, and incredibly, as many as 13% of Liberal Democrat voters still think Nick Clegg “sticks to what he believes in”.

You could have one – or quite possibly two – of those guys, who even their own supporters overwhelmingly think are useless. Or you could have a Scot leading a government of Scots elected by Scots making all the decisions about Scotland.

It’s your choice. You’ve got a year left to think about it.

We couldn’t help but notice this new BBC referendum logo.

We like how they’re thinking.

So it’s getting close to that time. How do we feel about gathering the team here?

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No campaign director Blair McDougall speaking to BBC News this morning.

Don’t you think he looks tired?

We’ve just had a response from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to our article of this morning. The Foundation has confirmed on the record, through its Twitter account, that the deputy leader of Labour in Scotland misrepresented its views on the BBC Radio 5 Live debate yesterday morning. Its reaction is below.

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Yesterday we pointed out a pretty disgraceful misrepresentation by Labour of the findings of an impartial, non-political research study which found that an independent Scotland would be far better placed to reduce inequality. But it wasn’t the only one.

Here’s the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, speaking at yesterday’s interesting two-hour BBC Radio 5 Live debate (for some reason that link only shows the last 50 minutes, although the earlier part had been televised too) at the Fruitmarket in Glasgow on the subject of child poverty.

We say “speaking”. We mean “lying”. In Sarwar’s case the words are interchangeable.

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In all the hoo-ha today about the poll figures which showed a clear majority for Yes if people thought they’d be £500 a year better off with independence, nobody seems to have paid much attention to what seems to us to be a rather more significant figure.

We should passingly note, of course, the oddity of 37% of Scots still being prepared to vote No even if it’d make them £500 richer every year – it’s a disproportionately high number for them ALL to be Labour MPs who can make that sum in five minutes with an expenses claim form – but we’d rather focus on the finding which showed that if people thought independence would leave them neither better nor worse off, the vote was a very close 39% Yes to 44% No (or 47-53 if you exclude Don’t Knows).

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There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.

The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)

This should be interesting, then.

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We don’t like to reprint old posts here as a rule, but with the Scotsman today reporting that the prospect of Scots being £500 a year better off would give the Yes camp a 10-point lead, it seems timely and appropriate to revisit this one from back in July:

(Link and link.)

Or put simply: Scots already over-contribute to the UK by, coincidentally, £500 a year each. If we leave the Union, without doing anything else at all, without changing a single spending plan or tax rate, we WILL be £500 a year better off. Job done! Now all Yes Scotland needs to do is tell everyone.

But which country?

“The room is full of campaign paraphernalia. A noticeboard bears pictures of staff dressed as Kitchener in ‘your country needs you’ poses.”

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We’ve been meaning to nag someone to present this data in a super-snappy visual form for ages, then what do you know except that the splendid Stewart Bremner just pops up out of nowhere and does it without even being asked.

Independence will NOT “abandon England to the Tories”. If the people of the rest of the UK choose to vote Tory, we can’t save them from themselves, even were we to be so arrogant as to assume we had any business doing so. If they choose to vote Labour, they’re equally capable of electing them just fine without our help.

Scottish votes are almost totally irrelevant to UK elections. We have no impact on the government England gets. They, on the other hand, force governments that we voted against on us more than 60% of the time. That’s not a union of equals. That’s the political equivalent of domestic abuse. It’s never the wrong time to walk away.

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