Wings Over Scotland

It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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The results of some of the questions in this week’s Panelbase independence poll are so striking we just couldn’t help ourselves. Let’s have a quick delve.

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It’s been a remarkable week in opinion polling, with YouGov calling the independence referendum for No on Sunday, Panelbase calling it for Yes on Monday, and TNS-BMRB, according to Prof John Curtice, calling it for Don’t Know by Wednesday.

When you look at those results more carefully it becomes apparent that only the initial YouGov poll holds good news for the No camp, and the reason for this comes down to the psychology of change.

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The No campaign got itself rather excited today about the third independence poll of this week, this time by TNS-BMRB, which showed a spectacular and unexpected doubling of the “Don’t Know” figures at the expense of both Yes and No.

We didn’t go into the other two in any depth (noting only the difference in media coverage of them), because as we’ve said for the last 18 months, simple Yes/No polls at this stage are fairly meaningless. But this one deserves a little scrutiny.

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Because everybody loves a good transcript, right?

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Sometimes there isn’t much happening in the world of politics, but it’d be a bit of a stretch to describe this week as one of those times. So we’re not sure in what context this article on the BBC website today counts as “news”.

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Curiously, the only place in the media we’ve been able to find even slightly detailed coverage of Gordon Brown’s speech on independence to a group of Labour MPs, MSPs and party apparatchiks in Govan this week was in Newsnet Scotland.

The press, which gave extensive coverage to the former Prime Minister’s last intervention in the debate, has barely mentioned the latest one, made again in the name of the figleaf “United With Labour” brand created to convince the party’s more gullible grassroots supporters that it’s not walking hand-in-hand with the Tories.

That may, of course, be because the media, while more or less obliged to cover UWL’s launch, is generally rather uncomfortable about it and doesn’t want to shine too much light on the group. But it may also be because Brown’s speech was such arrant, obvious nonsense that even Scotsman readers would be insulted by it.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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