Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday the UK government put out what was even by its standards a ludicrously hyperbolic piece of scaremongering about the costs of independence, suggesting that to set up all the governmental bodies the new state would require might come with an eye-watering price tag of £2.7 billion.

Its citing of the London School of Economics made it particularly interesting to hear what Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE actually said about the figures.

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Alert followers of our Twitter feed will have learned over recent months that we have a seriously uncanny ability to influence the outcome of football matches. Need your side to grab a couple of quick goals? Just get us to tweet “Team X looks like they couldn’t score if they played till next Thursday” and get ready to watch the net bulge.

(One day we’ll reveal the size of the bribe we took from a shady consortium of wealthy Hamilton Accies fans during the SPFL playoff against Hibs on Sunday.)

And now it looks like that talent has extended itself to newspapers.

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Some considered thoughts on the evening’s events, then.

Yeah, nice work, Britain.

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Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)

And it seems our critiques have already hit home.

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Having spent the last few months pleading poverty and pitiful-underdog status, “Better Together” this week appeared to have suddenly remembered that £500,000 cheque it got ages ago from Tory oil tycoon (and friend of genocidal war criminals everywhere) Ian Taylor, and started spending some of it.

12-page colour inserts in newspapers like the Daily Record and Guardian don’t come cheap, and hundreds of thousands of Scots found themselves looking at a small booklet which didn’t identify its source until the very last page, and could have been taken by the unwary to have been a production by the newspapers themselves.

(Especially given the little pale blue “sticker” on the front using what looks very much like the Guardian’s own typeface).

But that was the least of the dishonesty in “The Facts You Need”.

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For quite some time now, and in particular since the turn of the year, this site’s been pointing out two things about polling for the 2015 UK general election.

One is that Labour’s lead has been in steady decline since 2012. The other is that the polls present a falsely optimistic picture for Ed Miliband’s party, as ultimately a significant proportion of UKIP support is likely to vote tactically, because only two people have a chance of becoming Prime Minister and only one of them is promising what UKIP supporters want above all else – a referendum on leaving the EU.

Pleasingly, on one level at least, today we were proved right.

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While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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We learned a couple of moderately interesting things today. One was the result of our politely pestering Sunday Mail editor Jim Wilson, who agreed to release the data tables from the paper’s poll earlier this month which showed a 20-point No lead.

The pollster who conducted the survey, Progressive Partnership, isn’t a member of the British Polling Council, which meant the Mail was under no obligation to make the data available, but the editor very kindly chose to anyway in the interests of transparency and they can be found here.

What they reveal is that PP neither asked, nor weighted its results for, respondents’ party affiliations. That isn’t necessarily any sort of smoking gun – the referendum isn’t a party issue, and it may be that the sample happened to be reflective of voter distribution anyway – but the one thing it DOES tell us is that comparing the results with a party-weighted YouGov poll (as “Better Together” did in a desperate attempt to present a major swing to Yes as one towards No) is a complete nonsense.

The other thing we found out today was more disturbing.

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On last night’s Scotland Tonight, Labour MSP Patricia Ferguson claimed that a vote for independence would put at risk Scotland’s access to over £3 billion of BBC programming. It’s a curious and illogical straw-man argument rather akin to saying that if you stop being an ice-cream man you’re not allowed to have ice-cream any more, but we’ll let that slide until another day.

£3bn sounds like quite a lot of money, so in a dull moment we thought we’d study a week’s output from BBC One, the national broadcaster’s flagship channel, and see how much of it we could bear to live without.

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Dear God. It’s now almost two and a half years since this site first comprehensively debunked and disproved the notion that Scottish independence would give the Conservatives a permanent majority in the rUK parliament, in an article that’s been read many tens of thousands of times here and spread far and wide elsewhere.

So you’ll forgive us if we spend a few minutes smashing our heads against a brick wall in despair at the mind-bleeding idiocy of some slobbering, sponge-witted poltroon quoted at length in the Telegraph today.

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Last night, in our 10pm “And finally” comedy slot, we ran a picture of a Labour election leaflet we’d slightly altered in order to make a joke about the party’s well-documented historic predilection for postal-vote electoral fraud. Readers can form their own view about whether the gag was funny or not, but it was at least clearly flagged as an “And finally” and we also pointed out that the pic was a fake in the comments.

We’ve been searching this morning’s Scotsman for a similar disclaimer regarding its front-page headline, but as yet we’re not having a lot of luck locating it.

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In our poll results earlier today, we found out what Scots thought about the past and the present. But we also asked them to look ahead at the sort of Scotland (and UK) they see developing over the space of the next decade.

Here’s what they thought.

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