Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.
There’s been a certain amount of hoo-haa within the independence camp this morning about a Telegraph piece reporting comments by Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran in which she appears to cast doubt on whether devolution has been a good thing for Scotland at all.
We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.
Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:
Can you supply the missing words?
We’ve been meaning to mention this curious extract from a “Please send us cash!” mailshot that “Better Together” sent out this week:
It’s the middle sentence that caught our eye. We’re reasonably sure that the Scottish Government isn’t allowed under either Electoral Commission or Scottish Parliament rules to “spend millions of pounds of public money on propaganda campaigns”.
And while we also know that there are very few rules about political organisations telling lies to voters, one of the few that DOES exist is a prohibition against falsehoods where “the specific statement in question is part of a direct solicitation for money”, which this quite clearly is.
We might just have to drop the ASA a wee line.
The Scotsman, 19 September 2013:
“Only one in ten voters would prefer the next General Election to result in another coalition government, a poll has found as Nick Clegg sought to convince voters it was in the country’s best interests. More than two thirds (67 per cent) would prefer to see an outright victory by one party.
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.
The accusation that the Yes campaign proposes an impossible Scotland of low tax and high spend (often mocked as “Scandinavian spending with American taxation”) is a tactic frequently used by ‘Better Together’ to undermine the economic case for independence, with the implication that services would be cut due to lack of funds.
(Of course, they say that independence means slashing taxes at the same time as saying taxes will rise in an independent Scotland, but we’ll let that go for now.)
It’s an allegation commonly placed at the feet of the SNP (usually by Labour when wielding the old “Tartan Tories” stick, whereas the Tories prefer to insist that the SNP are dangerous neo-Marxists) that looking to offer tax breaks and incentives to encourage development is in actual fact right wing low-tax economics.
But that’s not necessarily the case. Cutting one or two taxes to boost growth doesn’t create a “low-tax economy” any more than cutting out a single sausage from a full English breakfast makes it low-fat.
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.
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).
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.
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:
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.
Isn’t it weird how since we did this, everyone’s suddenly started asking much more interesting questions in opinion polls about independence?
After months with almost no polling at all, and what there was being restricted to boring Yes/No affairs, there’s been an explosion in surveys conducted by every conceivable pollster for everyone and his dog, and nearly every one has followed our lead in digging below the headline response and trying to find out what makes Scottish voters tick when it comes to their views on the constitution.
Today has two new sets of data to chew over, with fascinating results.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
