Wings Over Scotland

As we were compiling our second poll, it struck us that it provided an opportunity to find out a lot of things about the Scottish public at once, that weren’t necessarily directly related to the referendum.

Politicians and newspapers routinely make all sorts of claims about what the public’s attitude to various issues are, but whenever we Google for polling data backing up those assertions it’s very thin on the ground, especially for Scotland specifically.

So as usual, we just went ahead and did it ourselves.

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As readers will know because we always go on about it, we’re not very fussed about straight Yes/No polls this far out from the vote. We want to get right under the Scottish electorate’s skin, so for our second crowd-funded poll (as with the previous one) we asked for their opinion on all sorts of other stuff too.

But the media is boring and only cares about the simple bits. Headlines first, then.

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SHOULD SCOTLAND BE AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY?

Yes 35%
No 43%
Undecided 20%

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Just an eight-point gap, which remains unchanged if you only include people who are at least 8/10 likely to vote – the numbers in that scenario move to Y37-N45-DK17. With the white paper still unpublished and 11 months to go, the Yes side needs a mere 4% swing to close the gap completely.

But that’s just about the least interesting stat in our poll.

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We couldn’t be bothered staying up for the Dunfermline by-election result. Roughly 60 seconds into the coverage we switched over to Family Guy on BBC3, and then – faced with the unwelcome prospect of all the same old faces spouting all the same old guff as they filled dead air with deathly waffle for a few hours – we went to bed.

Since the disgraced Bill Walker’s resignation (if you can call it that, so unwillingly was he dragged out by the ankles), it’s been obvious that Labour would win, and you don’t stay up into the wee small hours watching a TV show you already know the end of.

So with the benefit of a new day’s eye, let’s have a wee delve.

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We’ve been digging around behind the scenes for the last few days now trying to make sense of the labyrinthine tangle of claim and counter-claim over what’s going on at the Ineos refinery and petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth. The press is full of competing assertions from the various parties involved, so we’re just going to tell you what we know for sure and see where it ends up.

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We had a fascinating discussion on Twitter yesterday on the subject of lotteries. It was sparked by the latest cunning money-raising scheme by “Better Together”, in which they enlisted unsuccessful “Great British Bake-Off” contestant James Morton to solicit donations, with the lure of a free signed copy of his book (cover price £20) for five lucky draw winners who’d donated more than £10.

The only slight problem with the plan is that it’s against the law.

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We got slightly distracted yesterday by documenting some eye-popping Unionist madness, and completely forgot to finish our investigation into the Guardian’s odd claims that the Scottish Government had “delayed”, “softened” and “compromised” its stance on the removal of Trident from Scotland after independence, and that such a move betrayed nervousness over the feasibility of its goal of NATO membership.

We examined one piece by Severin Carrell, but the paper actually ran two by the same author on the same subject, and the second was just as inaccurate and misleading.

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So, we suppose we have to point out the obvious.

The conduct and result of a Holyrood by-election isn’t strictly within this site’s remit, but the astonishing audacity with which Labour are prepared to flat-out lie to the Scottish public is, because it reflects on everything they say about independence.

So let’s step through the breathtaking piece of literature above.

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You may have noticed we’ve been a bit paralysed by choice today. Bizarre idiocy from the No camp has broken out across so many different fronts at once that we couldn’t decide which one to tackle first.

Labour’s extraordinary attempt to steal the SNP’s clothes in Dunfermline? The Mail’s hilarious editorial on the “bitter attacks” of the “demoralised” Yes campaign? Alan Cochrane’s disintegrating composure and sanity? The cluelessly deranged “Braveheart and Sassenachs” wordspew from Andrew Gilligan in this morning’s Telegraph?

On reflection, the most significant is probably the increasingly noticeable shift in the tone of coverage in the Guardian, the UK newspaper with by some distance the most extensive Scottish reporting. At the weekend we highlighted a truly horrible piece of sub-Daily-Express smearmongering by the  paper’s Scottish correspondent Severin Carrell based – on its own open admission – entirely on rumours and speculation from a couple of Labour activists.

Today, the same reporter adopted a more subtle approach.

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In the 1979 general election, the Scottish Conservatives received 916,000 votes. In 1984, only a few years later, the US historian Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly which explored the bizarre fact that governments sometimes act directly against their own interest, and lose the American colonies or the Vietnam war as a result.

She identifies the chief folly as ‘wooden-headedness’ – sticking blindly to a policy despite all evidence that it is failing. Since 1976, the Scottish Tories have been doing just that. Too stupid to realise that they had to act differently or suffer for it. Too poor in imagination to reach for alternatives. And rapidly becoming too wee to be relevant.

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On the day of the march and rally for independence in Edinburgh last month, the BBC’s coverage was token to the point of openly contemptuous. As 20,000 people marched through the nation’s capital to hear the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and others speak in public, the state broadcaster grudgingly provided a few seconds of footage of the march on Reporting Scotland, and then bizarrely gave equal airtime to the “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall and a suspiciously staged-looking leafleting of four or five people by the No camp.

It struck us as weird at the time, and the episode of Reporting Scotland in question curiously never found its way onto the iPlayer, unlike every other one.

And then tonight it happened again.

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By now most of you will probably have seen the BBC’s revelations about HS2, and how the government tried to conceal the predicted negative economic effects on areas not served by the new line. A Freedom Of Information request revealed the plan would see almost £320m a year sucked out of the Aberdeen and Dundee areas alone, with the benefit going to London (£1.5bn), Manchester (£834m) and Birmingham (£764m).

(In fairness, the document also suggested Edinburgh and Glasgow would be net winners, though we can’t for the life of us understand how. If reducing the journey time from Edinburgh to London generates more investment in Edinburgh – a dubious enough premise to start with – why does reducing the journey time from Aberdeen to London by the same amount of time have the opposite effect?)

The good news for the residents and businesses of the North-East, of course, is that Scotland’s share of the cost of HS2 is a mere £4.2bn at the latest estimates (which are of course likely to be revised dramatically upwards over time), which is only enough to double the current government investment in ScotRail for around 14 years.

Where do we sign up for this bargain?

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This week, the University and College Union (UCU) have set out their manifesto for higher and further education in anticipation of the independence referendum. It denounces the funding system preferred by the big three Westminster parties and offers full backing to the Scottish Government’s policy of free tuition, while calling for immigration changes in order to support students and academics coming from abroad to study and work in Scotland.

“It is right that students who benefit from higher-than-average incomes should pay something back, but they should do so through progressive income tax,”

“Business depends on graduates and should make a contribution rather than receiving tax breaks. Higher education should be substantially paid for through general taxation.”

“Scotland does not have great concerns about an immigration influx and should relax rules which could lead to greater recruitment of students, though they may be put off by negative perceptions of the UK system.”

While the report doesn’t say so explicitly, these views put the UCU clearly on the Yes side – immigration and taxation would continue to be powers reserved  to Westminster in the event of a No vote, and the prevailing political climate in England (particularly the south) suggests a very different direction of travel.

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