Wings Over Scotland

Last year, as we’ve done a number of times in the past, we wrote about the dangers of handcuffing the independence movement to a particular narrow political agenda. Conflating a Yes vote with a number of hardline ideological positions which are more or less unquestioned within the liberal commentariat and the radical left, but actually highly unpopular with the general public, is self-evidently a huge strategic mistake.

Many of those positions are ones which this site supports in their own right, such as abolition of the monarchy and the abandonment of nuclear weapons, but our stance has always been that those arguments – like membership of the EU and NATO – are ones which ought properly to be conducted among the people and elected politicians of an independent Scotland in their own good time, not imposed without debate as part of the package of independence.

This weekend the notionally pro-independence Sunday Herald newspaper – as well as taking part in a media-wide Unionist smear campaign against this site and defending a “Better Together” activist who’d written a deeply offensive clickbait Guardian article claiming that Scottish nationalism was racist – carried a front cover and inside spread on the heated topic of mandatory gender quotas, which the paper supports.

As it happened we’d asked about the subject in our Panelbase poll last month.

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Our attention was drawn today to hardcore shrieky Loyalist nutter collective Scotland In Union releasing “new research” on an independent Scotland’s finances, which in fact came out last year but which for unknown reasons they’re touting again now.

Commissioned by the loongroup from a London-based thinktank that we’d never heard of by the name of “Europe Economics”, it predictably produces a doom-and-gloom conclusion that independence would have cost over £10bn in the first year.

There are so many gaping chasms in the logic we could hardly stop laughing for long enough to type, but one in particular was worth wiping the tears from our eyes for.

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This is a story in the Herald today.

Thing is, we know it’s a lie. Who says so? Kezia Dugdale does.

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We were very pleased to hear Gary Robertson challenge Kezia Dugdale on the curious matter of Scottish Labour’s membership and income figures on today’s Good Morning Scotland. Dugdale flapped and dodged and waffled for as long as she could before diverting the topic onto federalism, and eventually managed to wriggle away from the subject without any sort of proper answer (through no fault of Robertson’s).

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 24 February 2017)
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But what she said just made the situation MORE confusing, not less.

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There’s an interesting story in the Herald today about Scottish Labour’s finances.

It reveals that the party’s income from donations plunged from £600,000 in 2015 to £100,000 last year, which in the article is blamed on Jeremy Corbyn’s UK leadership (even though Dugdale opposed him in the leadership election).

But there were a few comments in the piece that we thought needed scrutiny.

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The reliably-wise Stephen Bush of The New Statesman said something perceptive yesterday on the subject of an EU referendum, although it applies much more widely.

It’s a view we’ve held for many years, most often in relation to UK governments ruling with huge majorities won on pretty tiddly pluralities of the vote (often in the mid-30%s), where the bulk of the electorate has no defence against a party it didn’t vote for.

Despite an electoral system that makes such events far rarer, the phenomenon crops up a lot in Scotland too, and both sides are guilty, often on the same subject. Scottish employment figures, for example, alternate with almost metronomic regularity between being higher/lower than those in the rest of the UK, and whichever it is in any given month one side or the other will trumpet it as conclusive and permanent proof that Scotland’s governance is better/worse than that of London.

(Even though Holyrood in fact has almost no power over the economy, so deserves little of either the blame or credit, whichever applies that month.)

The most common case, though, is Trident.

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From today’s Herald:

It seems a good time to bring up another piece of our poll data.

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No voters, Leave voters and Labour/Tory voters are more racist than Yes, Remain, Lib Dem and SNP voters. Who could ever have guessed?

The former groups all agreed that there was a problem with too much immigration in Scotland. The latter groups all disagreed. It’s that stark, folks.

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The one great pillar of the argument against Scottish independence – greater than not being allowed into the EU, greater than being forced to barter with beads and potatoes because we wouldn’t have a currency, greater than losing Doctor Who or having the Chinese take their pandas back – is the economy.

Scotland is far too wee and too poor to be independent, they say – while indignantly denying that they’re saying it – because we only survive now thanks to a vast bailout every year from the rest of the UK, by which they in fact mean England. (Because it’s sure as heck not coming from Wales or Northern Ireland, which by any measure you care to choose are far poorer than Scotland.)

The name and size of this bailout vary wildly. Sometimes it’s a “deficit”, sometimes it’s a “black hole”, sometimes it’s a “fiscal transfer”, and it can be £8bn, £9bn, £10bn, £15bn, £28bn, £32bn or any other figure up to a hundred and eleventy thousand million bajillion squillion depending on who you’re talking to.

(The last one’s probably either David Coburn or Jackie Baillie.)

And while there are a dozen separate and compelling reasons why that argument is complete rubbish, none of them have any traction with diehard Unionists determined to believe that one of the richest and most blessed nations on Earth couldn’t possibly manage its own affairs like, say, Latvia or Ireland or Kuwait or Slovakia can.

But it turns out there IS a – surprisingly simple – way to get Unionists to categorically deny that England subsidises Scotland. You just have to ask them.

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From these small beginnings shall our ultimate victory come.

The votes for “God Save The Queen” being driven by Tories, English-born residents and supporters of a particular football club probably won’t come as the biggest shock in the world to anyone.

(Alert viewers will of course have noticed that due to MI5 INTERFERENCE in the poll, there were actually two votes for Hoots Mon, which have been suspiciously rounded down to one. We are conducting an investigation, by which we mean brutal purge.)

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson managed to make a bit of a balloon of herself earlier this month when she contrived to get THREE fairly key facts wrong in a single tweet about a poll on a second independence referendum.

(We’re not sure who the guy in the picture with her is. Probably a colleague.)

We suspected the reason she’d so badly misunderstood the data was that there were two options for “have another indyref in the next two years” and only one for “don’t have another indyref”, so when we were putting our latest poll together we thought we’d try to make it easier for her by having an equal number on both sides.

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There’s a nice piece in today’s Scottish Sun about one of the findings of our newest Panelbase poll, on who was Scotland’s all-time best First Minister.

We thought you’d want a more detailed look at the data behind it.

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