Wings Over Scotland

Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

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In so far as this Holyrood election has been a battle at all, the battleground for it has been tax. Not only the Unionist opposition but the pro-indy left have attacked the SNP for timidity over its plans to keep income tax rates the same as the rest of the UK, with only a tweak on the threshold for the top rate.

In their defence the Nats have deployed a line that’s been widely derided as an old Tory argument derived from the so-called “Laffer curve”, but in fact is nothing of the sort. It centres around the ways wealthy people legally shield their income from tax, but there’s a very specific and very important wrinkle that applies only in the particular case of a devolved, not independent, Scotland.

It’s not at all complicated but it’s absolutely crucial, and it’s barely been discussed on even the most superficial level in any supposed analyses of the situation undertaken in the media, so as usual we suppose it’s going to be down to us to do the job.

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The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.

That was a quick switch.

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It’s been quite a 24 hours for watchers of the UK media. The Sunday papers saw two of the most demented rants to have been committed to print about Scottish politics since the independence referendum.

One came from Neil Oliver in the Sunday Times – painting a blood-curdling picture of a “second hate-fest” should Scots ever choose to debate the subject again – and the other from Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Express, beside itself with unhinged rage that Scots, having voted to remain in the UK, might exercise their right as UK citizens to also vote to remain in the EU.

(As a result of which we’ve concluded that a narrow rUK vote in favour of Leave being overturned by a huge margin in Scotland for Remain would be the funniest thing that had ever happened in British politics.)

They were joined this morning by David Torrance in the Herald wailing that “Scottish nationalists and Brexiteers have much in common. Both are utterly vacuous” (which readers might feel was a bit rich coming from the unchallenged master of vacuity) and blaming the parlous state of Scottish political discourse mainly on this site and the vile cartoonist Greg Moodie – along, of course, with the ever-dastardly SNP.

Such was the onslaught, in fact, that Fraser “I’d put £1000 on Ed Miliband to win the election” Nelson of the Spectator, of all people, turned up as the voice of reason.

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Considering we’re only eleven days from a general election, there’s remarkably little politics coverage in the Sunday papers today. Most of what there is is in the Sunday Herald, which has a substantial (and quite entertaining) interview with Kezia Dugdale and another two pages devoted to what’s essentially spluttering attempted justification of its shambolic front-page lead from last week.

We’re not going to go into it in depth, as James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already had a close look and made a pretty fair assessment. But for want of anything more interesting to talk about, and in the wake of some depressing Twitter conversations with people who apparently STILL don’t understand either the Holyrood electoral system or basic arithmetic, we’re going to have one more wade in the list-vote debate.

You might want to see if there’s football on or something.

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This site has never told readers how to vote in Scottish elections and never will, partly because its editor has no vote there and doesn’t have to live with the consequences whoever wins. (Something that ISN’T true about independence, in which case Wings would relocate to Scotland, which is why we freely express a firm view on that.)

It’s in that context that we make the following observations about next month’s vote.

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The Sunday Herald, which enjoyed a major sales boost from being the first Scottish newspaper to officially back independence but has since seen its circulation increase partly eroded, has this morning chosen to throw a stick of dynamite onto the fire.

The paper’s front page today teases a double-page spread inside with the headline “SPECIAL REPORT: HOW INDEPENDENCE SUPPORTERS SHOULD USE THEIR SECOND VOTE”. And then things get a little strange.

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Last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Times gave an article to a Green activist and party worker – not billed as such, even though until last month he was on the party’s regional candidate list for Lothian – to predict that the Greens would get 10 seats at next month’s election.

Much campaigning by the various fringe parties for the Holyrood contest has been based on “seat predictors” like the one deployed to produce the figures in the piece, purporting to show that a tactical-voting strategy on the list can deliver a large gain in numbers of pro-independence MSPs compared to using both votes for the SNP.

We’ve examined that argument in considerable depth already, both theoretical and practical. But its also worth noting that so-called “seat predictors” are a rather shaky basis for making such bold forecasts.

Let’s illustrate that assertion.

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Poor old Daily Record.

What a distance to fall.

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When we ran this story on Monday, some of the press got rather upset with us. Even though we’d linked to the full data tables published on the ComRes site, Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden, for example, huffily tweeted a link to a cropped table suggesting that the real sample size was higher.

And as it turned out, it was.

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We’re very confused today.

Okay, so that’s all straightforward enough. The SNP are bad because they’re going to hit “middle Scotland” with more tax. Bunch of dangerous tax-and-spend lefties. Right?

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Barring some sort of unforseeable apocalypse, Scottish Labour aren’t going to win the Holyrood election in May, so it doesn’t really matter what their policy proposals are – they’re never going to happen.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty much our job to examine stuff like their plan to “scrap council tax”, and it’s more fun than watching the news today, so let’s give it a go.

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