Wings Over Scotland

We saw a very interesting article on the London School of Economics website today.

It notes that in 2006, the year before the SNP came to power, 65% of Scots identified themselves as “Scottish not British” or “more Scottish than British”, but by 2014 – the year of the independence referendum – that number had fallen to just 49%.

It concludes, correctly, that just as we noted on Sunday, support for independence is fundamentally political in nature, not nationalist. But that only tells half the story.

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Barely a week – indeed, barely a day – has gone by over the last year or so without some angry, confused and hurt-sounding Unionist pundit or politician churning out yet another article on the theme of “WHY AREN’T YOU GRATEFUL THAT WE SAVED YOU FROM INDEPENDENCE, YOU APPALLING PLEBS?”

As far as the No side are concerned, the oil-price slump is a slam-dunk game-ender which finally conclusively proves that Scotland is too wee and too poor to run its own affairs, and their uncomprehending bewilderment as support for a Yes vote not only fails to disintegrate but keeps increasing even as the oil price sinks lower and lower has been quite a phenomenon to behold.

So we were interested to see today’s Sunday Times report a YouGov poll done for the comedy grumpy-old-white-guys support group (and spectacularly unsuccessful tactical voting enthusiasts) Scotland In Union, and somewhat miss the point of the results.

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There’s nothing unusual about reading something in the Scottish media that makes your eyes widen. But a piece we saw in the Courier earlier today stretched ours out to Clockwork Orange-like proportions.

Now that’s a pretty intriguing opening (as the bishop said to the actress). At first we took it to mean that an independent Scotland could effectively take over Britain’s EU membership in the event of a Leave vote, ending any debate about whether and when it would be admitted on its own.

But then the punchline arrived.

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian about the clown-shoed fiasco of a position the Labour Party has contorted itself into over Trident. It correctly identifies the conflict between a party representing its actual membership and being controlled by its Parliamentarians who insist they know better than the people they’re supposed to speak for, but then right at the end veers off to an irrational conclusion.

Because the obsessive insistence of the vast majority of commentators that political parties – and they’re nearly always talking about Labour – must at all times pander to the centre ground leads inescapably to one logical endpoint: that all political parties should disband themselves immediately and forever.

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STV have leaked the results of Scottish Labour’s list-candidate rankings. Alert readers will recall that Kezia Dugdale promised that her leadership would see an influx of “new talent and fresh faces” to the beleaguered branch office’s ranks.

So let’s see how that panned out.

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Something kept nagging at the back of our minds as we read today’s front-page lead story in Scotland On Sunday about a battle between finance secretary John Swinney and a number of Scottish councils.

And then we remembered what it was.

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Here’s Kezia in the Independent yesterday:

The most powerful? Did it just get promoted?

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In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.

It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.

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The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.

But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.

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With little in the way of news to chew on, the Scottish political blogosphere has begun to eat itself of late, with an exhausting number of articles on popular sites about how an SNP list vote is a wasted vote and anyone thinking of voting for the Nats in both constituency and region is a deluded cultist/simple-witted idiot (mostly written by candidates/supporters of other parties who are often not identified as such), and now some angry pieces from disgruntled SNP supporters making the opposite point.

All are based, from one perspective or another, on opinion polls and seat predictions based on those polls, some of which appear to be based on very shaky premises.

We’ve already broken down the mechanics of the Scottish electoral system at very considerable length, so readers will be relieved that we’re not going to get into that again. Instead, we thought we’d take a very specific region-by-region look at the scale of the task facing the fringe parties.

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We suppose we shouldn’t technically be surprised that today’s newspapers carry no analysis whatsoever of Kezia Dugdale’s big speech yesterday detailing Scottish Labour’s first big election pledge – a £6000 handout to first-time home buyers.

After all, current polling suggests Scottish Labour have about as much chance of exerting any influence in the next Scottish Parliament as Lemmy has of posthumously winning the Eurovision Song Contest, so it doesn’t really matter if Kezia Dugdale promises every voter a free unicorn made of diamonds and glitter.

Still, if only for the mental exercise, it’s worth taking a look in detail.

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As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.

In more senses than one.

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