Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.
And it didn’t even go down fighting.
It’s probably fair to say that the voters of Scotland have been feeling a little put-upon lately. In the last decade they’ve been sent to polling stations on no fewer than 12 occasions (Holyrood elections in 2011 and 2016, UK elections in 2010, 2015 and 2017, council elections in 2012 and 2017, European elections in 2009 and 2014, and finally referendums on AV, independence and the EU).
And they’ve been subjected to endless weeks, months or even years of campaigning and haranguing each time. One woman – who only had to endure nine of those 12 – had famously had enough of it.
Yet Scots face possibly three more in the next 12 months or so, if various factions get their way, taking the total to 15 major votes in a decade. And if we want to secure the desired outcome in any of them, we’re going to have to ease the load on folk a bit.
Some new data from the long-running Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was released tonight, and it makes for fascinating reading.
The headline stat is that for only the second year in the 18 years the study has been running, independence is the most popular option for the governance of Scotland:
This doesn’t, however, mean that it’s the majority view, because while independence is backed by 45% the “No” option is split into two – support for devolution (41%) and those ultra-Yoons who want Holyrood abolished (8%).
Now, considering that as recently as 2012 those figures were independence on 23%, devolution 61% and no Parliament 13%, that’s still a remarkable shift in Scottish public opinion in a very short space of time – support for indy has DOUBLED in five years while devolution has dropped by a third.
And indeed, when the survey asked a straight Yes/No question the results came out even closer, at 48% Yes to 52% No – a 3% swing to Yes from the 2016 figures.
No wonder the Unionists are extra-twitchy lately.
We’ll shortly round up the last pieces of data from our Panelbase poll of English voters last month, but this one merits singling out, we think.
Wait, what?
We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.
Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.
But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.
The findings of Lord Bracadale’s report into hate-crime law in Scotland were published today (tl;dr version: OBFA’s coming back), and we couldn’t help observing them in the context of an interesting Guardian article on the alt/far right yesterday.
Because we’ve discovered something slightly odd about the subject.
This is from one of the first ever articles we wrote on Wings, just a couple of weeks after the site’s launch way back in November 2011:
Depressingly, some people still don’t get it.
We’ll keep this one brief, because it’s a bank holiday. We asked our Panelbase poll of English voters this month who they thought – regardless of respondents’ own politics – was doing the best job of leading their party. These were the results, in descending order of perceived competence:
1. Nicola Sturgeon (SNP)
Net rating: -5
(32% good, 37% bad, 31% don’t know)
2. Arlene Foster (DUP)
Net rating: -5
(13% good, 18% bad, 69% don’t know)
3. Vince Cable (Lib Dem)
Net rating: -7
(21% good, 28% bad, 51% don’t know)
4. Theresa May (Con)
Net rating: -18
(34% well, 52% badly, 14% don’t know)
5. Jeremy Corbyn (Lab)
Net rating: -19
(32% well, 51% badly, 17% don’t know)
Not a single net positive, and it seems particularly telling (and grim) that the two at the very bottom of the list are the only ones with any chance of actually becoming Prime Minister – pending, Lord have mercy on us all, the arrival of Jacob Rees-Mogg – while the top two don’t even sit in the UK Parliament.
(Foster, in fact, doesn’t currently sit in ANY parliament.)
To be honest, readers, it’s a miracle British people bother to vote at all any more.
Of all the dishonest memes regularly put around by the Unionist side in the Scottish constitutional debate, the most bare-faced is the notion of the “fiscal transfer”. Part-time pretend economists harp on endlessly about how the UK “transfers” money (the current popular figure is £9bn) to Scotland to balance the books every year, as if it was a munificent gift out of the sheer kindness of Westminster’s heart.
The reality, of course, is that it’s a loan, which Scotland has to pay back with interest. If an independent Scotland ran a deficit – like almost every country on Earth – it could take that loan out from any number of possible lenders and carry on as normal.
It is in no sense whatsoever an argument for Scotland staying in the Union, because it’s completely irrelevant to the Union, except in so far as that the only reason Scotland needs to borrow money at all is because it’s been part of the UK for the last 40 years and has been left impoverished as a result while a very similar neighbouring country has become wealthy beyond imagination.
But still, let’s indulge them for a moment and assume there really is a £9bn hole in Scotland’s finances. Is there anything we could do to reduce the size of it significantly? Well, since you ask, we have some poll data on that.
The phrase “the Labour Party has gotten itself into a catastrophic mess on [X]” is a sentence you can complete with almost any subject these days, whether it’s Brexit or anti-Semitism or anti-Asian racism or factionalism or Venezuela or just about anything else under the sun, so it should be no surprise that its gender policy is no different.
The party’s stance regarding all-women shortlists is now that men can be on them, so long as they say they’re women, with no questions asked, except when Labour decide arbitrarily that they aren’t really women at all because they’re obviously really men, except for all the other occasions when they’re obviously really men.
Which seemed like a timely moment for some more new poll data.
Last week we revealed that English voters would happily see Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK if it was the price of securing Brexit. But one of the odder things was that those figures included a sizeable number of Remain voters, who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.
We were a little perplexed, so we did a follow-up question asking those people if they’d elaborate a bit and got some interesting replies. One person, for example, answered “The Scottish people are very arrogant and although they want to be separate from the rest of the UK they are happy to take money from England”. Charming.
But there was also another stream of opinion on the subject, and it was revealed in the responses to another question in the original poll.
A couple of weeks ago Scottish Labour announced, to the traditional merriment, its commitment to greater federalism for the UK, as it has done every year since 2011 or indeed since 1910. (Sometimes under the equally-meaningless term “Home Rule”.)
In today’s Sunday Times, the much-missed former SNP spin doctor Kevin Pringle also pondered the idea, concluding that he could get on board a federal Scotland in the UK under certain conditions:
So in our poll of English voters last week, we thought we’d ask their opinion.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
