Wings Over Scotland

So first of all there’s this (click pic for full story):

…in which the figures appear to show that Iceland’s policy of imposing justice and imprisoning the greedy bankers who caused the world financial crash – rather than just shovelling money at them and letting them carry on robbing everyone – actually saw its economy recover at least as well as anywhere else’s.

But then things get more complicated.

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The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.

Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.

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There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.

The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.

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Most of today’s papers quote an unnamed Scotland Office spokesman on the subject of the Scotland Bill 2015, and in particular its clauses concerning welfare powers:

“It is factually wrong to claim there are vetoes in the Bill. These are sensible, practical arrangements to ensure the transfer of new powers smoothly.”

We’ll let readers judge for themselves.

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Earlier today we noted that the indyref had empowered the Scottish people to an extent that they seemed very reluctant to give up on. But plutocracies don’t become the establishment by giving up their thrones lightly, and so today we get this:

The above is a passage we selected completely at random from the Scotland Bill 2015, the administrative manifestation of “The Vow” and the Smith Commission. It’s entirely typical of the full 77-page document (PDF), which is essentially an unreadable wordspew completely impenetrable to normal people. And that’s no accident.

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STV’s Stephen Daisley yesterday penned one of the more thoughtful analyses we’ve seen on the future of Labour, both UK and Scottish varieties, although it’s perhaps a bit heavy on “they should do things that are popular and will make people vote for them” and a bit light on what those things would actually be.

But there’s also this.

It’s a bit like watching a rabbit on a motorway explain that lights can’t hurt you.

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Many pundits are of the opinion that the new Tory Max government will be actively hostile to the BBC, which the party has long believed is an expensive public-sector hotbed of right-on lefties. So when we did our latest poll, it seemed worth finding out how much the people of Scotland valued the state broadcaster.

There were, let’s say, some interesting quirks.

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The reasons for Scottish Labour’s obliteration at the hands of the electorate last week are manifold, and most of them were very thoroughly explored in the weekend’s press, for example by Kevin McKenna here and here.

But as is our wont here on Wings, we wanted something a little more empirical to get our teeth into, so a few days before the election we commissioned a poll of 1,013 Scottish voters from Panelbase covering some of the subjects the regional office had campaigned on under its branch manager Jim Murphy.

The results were fascinating.

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Much of the commentariat and media has been in a froth for the last 24 hours about the supposed failure of the nation’s pollsters to predict the Conservative victory. This, for example, was Labour’s highly-paid election guru David Axelrod:

But the truth is that the polls – just like the heavily-maligned exit poll which turned out to be bang on the money – got nothing wrong. The people interpreting them did.

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The media might be shocked. But readers of Wings aren’t.

Because there’s simply no excuse for anyone acting surprised.

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We’ll start with the “something”.

And that really is quite something.

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We’ve done another poll in conjunction with our dear chums at Panelbase, readers, which we think will be the last full-size Scottish one before the polls open. You may already have seen their headline voting-intention stats, but if not they’re below.

Those numbers suggest, depending which electoral forecaster you feed them into, over 50 seats for the SNP. The poll delivered some extremely interesting results, but we’re going to tease you and hold most of them over until tomorrow, because it’ll actually be a really slow news day.

(September 18 last year was one of the most miserable days of our lives, and we’re not talking about the result. It just seemed to drag on forever and ever, with nothing happening until past midnight. This way there’ll at least be something to read.)

But as a little taster, here’s a fascinating info-nugget.

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