Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Our poll of English voters has already revealed that, on balance, the people of England would be happy to ditch Scotland, Northern Ireland and (very narrowly) Gibraltar as the price of Brexit. But what about if we approached the idea of England’s independence the other way round? We thought of that too.

If England was already independent, its electorate would (by almost 3 to 2) be happy to join up with fellow Leave voters in Wales, but only fractionally over half of English people would want to enter a union with Scotland if they weren’t already in one.

(To be fair, they’ve already had most of the oil, so we’re not quite as attractive a bride as we once were.)

Considerably fewer fancied taking on Northern Ireland, but fairly substantial minorities were keen on the idea of entering a sort of mini-EU with one or more of France, the Netherlands and Belgium. English people are weird. But it certainly appears that an awful lot of them think that the UK has had its day and they’d rather just go it alone.

(And only a bit over a third wanted to be joined with all three other UK nations.)

Super-alert readers may also recall that in our first ever Panelbase poll, way back in August 2013, just 18% of Scots said they’d vote for a union with England if Scotland was currently independent, with 55% saying no. Looking back on the past 300 years, it looks increasingly like hardly anyone thinks it was such a great move.

Following the Scottish media’s week-long frenzy of stories about the “scandal” of baby boxes – in which it was revealed to the astonishment of the nation that cardboard is flammable and incapable of stopping an armoured assault from a tank division or a zombie plague – we were a little startled to note that the Guardian (which has now run THREE stories about how terrible it is to give babies nice free stuff) didn’t always have such a downer on the project.

Apparently (and as recently as this February) baby boxes are “great innovations” and “hugely popular” – so long as the SNP aren’t involved, of course, at which point they turn into grotesque deathtraps.

And it got us wondering: what else is only terrible when it happens in Scotland?

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This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

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Even in a sluggish news season, it’s somehow extra-dispiriting to see a once-august newspaper like the Sunday Times fill its pages by trying to flog its readers reheated old cobblers from the previous day’s Daily Mail.

We’ve already shredded the towering stupidity of the story itself (the Times dutifully repeats all the exact same drivel about meal deals and loyalty vouchers), so we were pleased when social media presented a new angle on it.

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Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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In one way or another, a lot of politics is being played out in courts at the moment. Whether it’s Spain trying to crush the Catalonian independence movement, America frantically trying to impeach its President before he does something REALLY crazy or the UK trying to redefine the most basic of human freedoms out of existence without ever putting an act before Parliament, judges are having as much say as ministers in deciding the future shape of Western civilisation.

Of the most direct interest to Scotland, of course, are the UK government’s attempts to trample all over the 20-year-old devolution settlement.

The urgency of the situation, with Brexit now less than a year away, has driven the Yes movement into one of its occasional paroxysms of dispute about when a second independence referendum should be attempted, with SNP MP Pete Wishart attracting some overheated opprobrium by warning against acting in haste, and in the process serving up a juicy gift-wrapped opportunity for Unionists and a news-starved media.

But the furore masks a key issue that the Yes movement – and more crucially, the Scottish Government – has failed to address for the last three years, and which it’s really going to have to deal with at some point.

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The accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers – last seen charging the taxpayer an eye-watering £20.4m for just eight weeks’ work during the collapse of Carillion – today published a report into the declining number of high-street retail outlets in the UK.

BBC Scotland was keen to put a regional slant on it.

According to the article, Scotland had put in the worst performance in the country. But that didn’t appear to be what the report said at all.

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