Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been scratching our heads a bit throughout the developing story of BAE’s job cuts in Portsmouth, Glasgow and Rosyth. Not least because it seems Scots are meant to be grateful that the Govan and Scotstoun yards have been “saved”, despite the reality being a huge slice of the workforce being made redundant.

(Curiously, not one story that we’ve been able to find mentions how many are actually employed at the two Clyde docks. We had to go back to 2010 to find out that it’s apparently 4000, meaning that the cuts will be slashing 20% of the yards’ manpower.)

But the strangest thing is something else.

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This was Glasgow South West MP Ian Davidson speaking (around 5:40) on Scotland Tonight just over a week ago, in a debate about independence and left-wing values sparked by the findings of a poll commissioned by this very website.

His contention was that independence wasn’t necessary to achieve left-wing goals:

“I used to be a councillor in Strathclyde. In many ways Strathclyde was actually far more radical than the Scottish Government has ever been. We had clear policies to combat deprivation – there was an emphasis on pre-fives, there was an emphasis on tackling poverty and misery and class differences in education that no Scottish Government has replicated.”

When we heard that, we went and checked some dates.

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If you click the image below, you can listen to just over nine minutes of Johann Lamont – whose £85,000 salary you pay –  on “Good Morning Scotland” earlier today.

Presenter Gary Robertson does about as good a job of questioning the Scottish Labour “leader” (never before have the inverted commas we habitually put around that word rung so true) as anyone could ask, so no criticism can be attached to him.

But after you’ve listened to all nine minutes, can anyone tell us a single actual fact we’ve learned about the Labour Party in Falkirk that we didn’t know before?

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This week it was claimed by Stuart Adam, senior economic researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), that taxes would have to rise almost 14% in an independent Scotland, if they were the sole method used to fill the Scottish budget deficit.

It’s a dramatic headline, for sure. But is it an accurate reflection on the relative finances of an independent Scotland and one that remained part of the United Kingdom? As ever, you have to dig a little deeper to find out what’s really going on.

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If there’s one phrase that has long bedevilled the Liberal party and its descendants, it’s ‘home rule’. What are we supposed to understand by it? And perhaps more to the point, what do modern Lib Dems understand by it?

If you go back in Liberal history to the time of the great William Gladstone, ‘home rule’ meant something. It meant the principle of self-governance for Ireland, with certain powers reserved to Westminster.

Gladstone’s idea of home rule was very similar to what we now call Devo Max. And when Gladstone stood up for this principle and fought to drive it through parliament, he was attacked in terms we recognise only too well today.

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Just when you thought it was safe, we’ve got one last bit of data for you from our second Panelbase poll, which seems to have really grabbed the attention of the Scottish political world (as best observed in the furious, hysterical reaction from “Better Together” activists on Monday evening when Scotland Tonight announced they were going to be referencing it in the show).

We asked people a couple of questions about their voting intentions in various circumstances, but some of the most intriguing and revealing results came when we inquired as to how they planned to vote in the 2016 Scottish general election.

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Something that Professor John Curtice said in an extensive and fair review of our second Panelbase poll today gave us some cause for thought.

It’s hardly a secret that the No campaign has spent just about every waking hour of its existence frantically trying to turn the referendum into one on the SNP and Alex Salmond in particular (despite the seemingly counter-productive nature of the tactic).

For all they’re worth, they try to present independence as being a proxy for a single political party, when in fact it’s the exact opposite – an attempt to restore Scotland to a meaningful democracy, rather than the stagnant one-party (Labour) state it’s been at every UK general election for the last 60 years.

And when we read Prof. Curtice’s article, it dawned on us that we now had the tools and the ammunition to blow that particular smear apart once and for all.

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The last of our poll data releases yesterday highlighted perhaps the biggest factor in deciding the outcome of the independence referendum – the views of the undecided. Cross-referencing those yet to make up their minds with the other questions in our survey tells us much about the arguments that will win or lose the vote.

So just before we make the full data tables available for any old Tom, Dick and Harry to peruse, here’s an exclusive early sight for the people who paid to make it happen.

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For our final instalment of poll data, we’re going to look at two groups of results that at first don’t appear to be connected, but which are more linked than you might imagine.

We’ll do the housekeeping first, to build the tension a bit. No skipping ahead.

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Both of our polls so far have been far less concerned with HOW people intend to vote in the independence referendum, and much more concerned with the WHY. So in the second one, we decided to have a bit of a dig around in their reasons, see what it was they really wanted, and what might change their minds.

We had no idea what to expect, but our respondents still managed to surprise us.

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In our previous poll, we discovered that the public overwhelmingly thought its politicians were a bunch of liars. Not a single one of them scored a net positive trust rating for truthfulness, although Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon had the small consolation of being well out in front of the competition as the least distrusted.

We felt a little bit sorry for the nation’s elected representatives, so we thought we’d give them a better chance this time around.

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Alert readers will recall that earlier today we revealed the answers to the first 10 questions we asked the Scottish public about their views on various topics not directly related to the independence referendum, just because we were asking them about stuff anyway and it seemed like a good idea.

Here, in a surprise twist, are the other 10.

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