Wings Over Scotland

There were no surprises in our latest Panelbase poll with regard to the independence question, at least not in terms of the headline figures – in line with a flurry of recent polls they came out at Yes 46% No 54%, with 2016’s Brexit vote seemingly having caused almost equal numbers of people to change sides since 2014.

But as readers will know, we usually like to probe a little bit deeper into the thoughts of our respondents than other media do, so we asked a few more questions on the subject. And the results of that were just plain weird.

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When we commissioned our latest opinion poll from Panelbase, we were aware that there’d been a lot of polls recently about independence and Brexit/the EU and even Westminster voting intentions, but surprisingly few on the next thing that Scots will actually go to polling stations for – the council elections in May.

That’s odd because it’s a pretty significant vote, and could lead to some fairly seismic changes in how the country is governed. Despite losing the popular vote for the first time in 2012, Labour are still the dominant force in Scotland’s town/city halls, running almost twice as many of the country’s 32 local authorities (either in sole control or in coalition/minority administrations) as the SNP – 16 to nine.

Depending on the outcome in May, the Nats could either secure a grip on all levels of Scottish elected politics for the first time ever, or a Tory alliance with Labour as junior partners could keep most councils Unionist – something which could have all sorts of wider ramifications beyond local services. (That’s an article for another day.)

So the results below are pretty interesting.

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The Sunday Herald ran an extraordinary article on page 2 yesterday, and by the time we’d finished being startled by what nonsense it was, it set us wondering about why.

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Way back in October last year we analysed what now seems to have become the key plank of Unionist argument against independence in the wake of Brexit – the idea that because Scotland does more trade with the rest of the UK than it does with the EU, independence would be economic suicide because Scotland would be sacrificing “the UK single market” (a thing that doesn’t actually exist ) for a much smaller one.

It’s a completely idiotic position, but to be honest we didn’t do a very good job of boiling the counter-argument down to something snappy and quoteable, so let’s have another go and see if we can manage something a little better.

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Actual Scottish politics news continues to be thinner on the ground than the crowds at a Donald Trump inauguration, so we sympathise once more with the gentle souls of the Scottish press as they endeavour to fill empty pages without doing anything more journalistically strenuous than slightly rewording a Labour or Tory press release.

Fortunately for us, of course, we’ve always got their dismal efforts to talk about.

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It’s a well-known fact, of course, that 87% of all statistics are made up. But as this site regularly observes, if you’re the Scottish opposition and media there’s no need to invent fake ones when you can twist the real ones to present an image completely at odds with the reality.

The Sunday Times today has some fine examples of the craft of massaging figures for the purposes of deception. It carries two separate scare stories on the NHS, both of them using figures which aren’t based on any sort of news, but on opposition spin on existing stats. One comes from the Tories, under a dramatic headline:

The banner is pulling a classic trick – the £685m figure is actually the total sum spent in a decade, not the single year that most people would assume (since there’s no good reason to measure spending in decades, so headlines usually don’t do it). But remarkably it’s just about the most honest thing in the paper’s health coverage today.

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We’ve never been all that convinced by the political strategy of parties angrily pointing out their rivals have supposedly broken their manifesto promises once in government. After all, since by definition the complaining party was very probably opposed to the policies in question, shouldn’t they be delighted if they haven’t been enacted?

(It’s different, of course, in the event of something like a referendum, where something that all of the parties concerned agree is good – staying in the EU, say, or protecting jobs in the civil service or the oil industry – is promised in return for a particular vote, but then swiftly trashed once that vote is won.)

It’s even weirder if the opposition was the REASON the policies didn’t get enacted. It’s incredibly bizarre to vote something down (as the Unionist parties did repeatedly to the SNP minority administration of 2007-11 when it brought its manifesto pledges forward), and then huff at the governing party for the fact that you outvoted them.

But today the Scottish Tories have found an intriguing new twist on the wheeze.

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This week a Scottish journalist told us ruefully that over the festive holidays, all parties send the newspapers “Christmas boxes” comprising a load of ready-made and pre-chewed garbage stories, each embargoed to specific days, for them to run in the news desert between Boxing Day and January 3rd with no further effort required.

(This year’s crop had been particularly dismal, our source revealed.)

It seems, though, that the media plans to continue the practice all year.

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We’ll be honest with you, readers, we’re not looking forward to 2017 one little bit. It’s going to be the most tedious year in Scottish politics since we started this website, and perhaps since the advent of devolution.

Other than the mild distraction of the council elections in May – which are likely to be a bit of a damp squib due to the deadening effect of STV and the propensity of Labour and the Tories to do deals to keep the SNP out of power – pretty much nothing even a little bit interesting is going to happen.

All we ARE going to hear about is Brexit and the EU, over and over and over and over again, and everything we’re going to hear is the same empty, pointless, space-filling speculation we’ve already been hearing since June. So let’s just get it down, and then we can link to it every week and go and do something useful with our time instead.

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Alert readers may have noticed with barely-concealed disinterest that Scottish Labour have announced their intention to have another really hard think about devolution.

With Labour not looking like being in power at either Holyrood or Westminster for at least a decade, and their opinions therefore being about as relevant as our ideas as to who should play in the back four for Real Madrid next weekend, most papers treated the news with the gravitas it deserved, such as this report in the Sunday Post:

But we thought it might be a snappy idea to keep track of all the times the Unionist parties have promised that they’ve come up with the ultimate form of devo-X.

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale at FMQs today.

Just for fun, let’s do the sums again, shall we?

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For some reason the Unionist community has this week been turning the bullhorn up to maximum on the subject of pensions. Most likely provoked by the publication of Dr Craig Dalzell’s fascinating “Beyond GERS”, the usual suspects have returned to the scaremongering tactics deployed during the indyref, attempting to terrorise the elderly with blood-curdling threats of destitution once again.

It’s a bewildering approach, given that the situation regarding pensions is one of the few around independence about which there is known certainty. The UK government already pays the state pension to millions of people outside the UK, under rules which would apply in exactly the same way if Scotland became a “foreign” country.

But just for fun, let’s look at exactly what the situation would be in the monumentally implausible event that Blair McDougall was telling the truth for once.

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