Wings Over Scotland

The Unionist media has leapt on former SNP adviser Alex Bell’s blog post about the economic case for independence this week like a starving dog thrown a sausage.

It’s been wringing articles out of it for days, the latest being Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record, in which the unembarrassable hack (last seen trumpeting an entirely imaginary £20bn increase in Holyrood’s budget from the Smith Commission proposals) rather audaciously takes someone else to task over an economic “lie”.

Bell’s article is such self-evidently weak sauce that we haven’t bothered with it until now. But as it seems clear that the papers are going to talk about nothing else for the forseeable future, we may as well point out the obvious.

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The Additional Member System by which the Scottish Parliament elects its MSPs is a fascinating construct. One of its functions, at least in theory, is to ensure that every party gets its best and brightest talents into the Holyrood chamber, by providing them with a “second chance” in the form of the regional lists.

The Conservatives, for example, would be hard pushed to ever get their leader elected if they could only contest constituency seats. Ruth Davidson got a pitiful 1,845 votes in Glasgow Kelvin in 2011, and whatever you think of the Tories it’s hard to dispute that she’s one of their more able operators. (Faint praise though that may be.)

One weakness of the system is that regional MSPs are sometimes seen as “second class” members, having been personally (and in Davidson’s case, comprehensively) rejected by the electorate but still snuck in against the voters’ wishes under cover of the list. But in the current era of remarkable domination by the SNP, for the opposition it’s increasingly being chosen to fight for a constituency that’s the booby prize.

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When we commission polls we don’t like to just ask people easy questions like who their favourite member of One Direction is. We like to put them on the spot and make them actually think about stuff, and this time was no different:

“The UK government is imposing severe cuts to tax credits and benefits in order to save £12 billion from its budget. Scotland’s per-capita share of the cuts would be around £1 billion.

The Scottish Government will in future have the power to compensate those who lose out, by creating new payments it’ll have to fund itself.

Which of the following is closest to your view?”

Because we thought it was unlikely any Scottish Labour MSPs would be taking our poll, we decided to discount the “magic lots of extra money out of thin air” option and only allow respondents to pick from intellectually-coherent choices.

Their answers were enlightening.

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The task facing the Scottish independence movement is to change the minds of just 6% of Scots. That’s all it would take to turn September 2014’s defeat into a victory if and when another referendum comes around, and when you put it like that it doesn’t sound like an impossible job.

The question for Yes supporters is where to focus their energies. A proportion of people who live in Scotland will never vote for independence no matter what, for a variety of reasons we don’t need to go into here. But we’ve always wondered exactly how big that proportion was, so in our latest Panelbase poll we just asked straight out.

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The House of Lords has been in the news quite a bit recently, one way and another. So in our latest poll we thought it might be fun to ask a few questions about it.

We decided to have something for everyone.

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A few weeks ago, we were told by a source that BBC Scotland’s flagship weeknight current-affairs show Scotland 2015 was recording some truly shocking viewing figures, in the region of 5,000 people a night. When we sent the BBC an FOI request for the stats, it was rejected, like almost all FOIs to the Corporation are.

We also looked into trying to get the data from BARB, but they weren’t very helpful either. So the only option we had left to get any sort of idea at all was to ask in our latest Panelbase poll.

When the results came in, we understood why the BBC wanted it kept quiet.

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This one rather speaks for itself.

(Data below from our latest Panelbase poll.)

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As alert readers will know, we’ve just done another Panelbase opinion poll. You’ll be hearing more about the results over the next couple of days, but we thought we’d give you the headline finding first.

The most interesting thing about those numbers is that as far as we can make out that’s the highest Yes figure Panelbase has ever returned for that question. (The last two times, for the Sunday Times in September and July, both came out 47-53.)

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One of the stranger criticisms regularly levelled at this site is that we don’t attack the SNP/Scottish Government enough.

That’s weird firstly because it’s not like there’s currently a shortage of hostile media scrutiny of Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues, and secondly because we’ve never in our four-year life claimed for a moment to be neutral.

But the reality is far more nuanced than that.

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What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.

Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.

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Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.

Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.

So we thought we’d see if it was true.

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Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

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