And just to finish off our in-depth study into respective coverage of the recent YouGov and Panelbase polls in the Scottish media, here’s the Scottish Daily Express.
Reporting of the YouGov poll (giving the No camp a 30% lead) is at the top, and the Express’ coverage of the Panelbase poll (putting Yes narrowly in front) is below.
Alert readers will, we trust, remember how yesterday we highlighted the somewhat differing approaches that the Herald and Scotsman both took to reporting the two drastically-opposed independence polls of the last 48 hours.
Here’s the Daily Record’s version.
Almost every newspaper today reported a declaration by George Osborne that a No vote would result in a boost to Scottish family incomes of a dramatic-sounding £2,000. The headline figure, which some papers gave a more negative spin, was actually a cumulative sum spread over 30 years (because “£67 a year per family”, or £1.29 a week, sounds rather less impressive as a compelling case for the Union).
It hinged on forecast economic growth of 4% – due to “extra trade, labour migration and cross-border investment” – compared to that in an independent Scotland.
Those are two pretty sweeping predictions. Is the Chancellor that good a fortune-teller?
Forgive the mangled Star Trek/Blackadder reference, there.
We’ve been having a wee dig around in the just-released full data tables from today’s Panelbase poll, and found something we thought was particularly interesting, and which we don’t think anyone’s picked up on, because it’s a bit tricky to get your head round. Walk with us while we simplify it.
Now, this is interesting. Alert readers will have noticed (by which we mean “be sick of us banging on about”) the fact that we recently conducted a poll which suggested the Yes and No votes were a lot closer than the media portrayal, and the media blanked it with a bunch of feeble excuses including “you had a satirical option in one of your questions”, “you used leading wording” and “we were all on holiday that week”.
We’re not making that last one up.
The media coverage we got for our troubles was a nasty smear campaign (warning: image Not Safe For Anyone). On the other hand, despite being at the beach and the zoo and goodness knows where else, the Scottish press managed to splash another poll a couple of weeks later, showing a massive lead for No, all over the front pages.
The fishy smell, though, was about to get a lot stronger.
To the ASTONISHMENT OF ALL, the Scottish media has leapt to cover a new poll today. It was conducted on behalf of the cross-party “Devo Plus” group, which we were mildly surprised to discover apparently still exists despite the previous two posts on its website being dated February 2013 and November 2012.
Being far more fair-minded than other news outlets, however, and not ones for bearing petty grudges, Wings Over Scotland is more than happy to run some analysis on it.
A curious facet of the independence debate in recent weeks has been the rise in – mostly, but not exclusively, Unionist – commentators rubbishing the idea that Scots are significantly different in their social attitudes from people in the rest of the UK.
It’s been pointed out that a majority of Scots support the benefit cap (glossing over the fact that it applies to basically nobody in Scotland), it’s been claimed that most Scots back Trident, and most recently that contrary to popular belief, they’re no less Eurosceptic than their English neighbours.
So we were curious when Saga recently conducted a large-sample poll of its members (people aged 50 and above, generally considered to be the most conservative demographic) about their attitudes to the EU, and the Scottish press reported it without mentioning the Scottish results.
Some random unordered thoughts on this evening’s events at Westminster.
From the “Better Together” blog today:
“No doubt”? Now, we know that isn’t true, and what’s more we know that almost 70% of Scots don’t believe it either. So who are the No camp trying to fool?
We’ve already briefly discussed Bill Jamieson’s article in today’s Scotsman claiming an independent Scotland will be more likely to suffer financial collapse and wouldn’t be able to afford to bail out its banking sector, that its economy will diverge from the rUK due to differing economic policies (making Sterling a millstone round Scotland’s neck), and that Scottish banks would relocate their headquarters to London as a result.
We’ve heard these dire tales of “too wee, too poor” inadequacy a thousand times. “But you couldn’t bail out the banks!” is perhaps the most scratched and worn-out disc in the No campaign’s entire DJ setlist of doom-and-gloom tunes. What we need is some sort of independence Woody Bop Muddy, but while we look for his number let’s yawn our way through this tired old scaremongering cobblers one more time.
The debt Scotland stands to inherit as an independent nation is often used as a stick to beat the Yes camp, and various “estimates” of the size of said debt – ranging from the merely extreme to the comically deranged – are a core element of the scare stories that suggest Scotland would have a fragile economy prone to collapsing the first time there was a bad year for oil prices/production.
But to understand the reality you need to dig a little into the nature of the debt, as the relatively widely-known figures of outstanding UK debt only tell half the story. Delving into the (deliberately) labyrinthine world of finance is a daunting task, but we’ll keep this as understandable as we can.
Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.
But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
