We’ll shortly round up the last pieces of data from our Panelbase poll of English voters last month, but this one merits singling out, we think.
Wait, what?
The findings of Lord Bracadale’s report into hate-crime law in Scotland were published today (tl;dr version: OBFA’s coming back), and we couldn’t help observing them in the context of an interesting Guardian article on the alt/far right yesterday.
Because we’ve discovered something slightly odd about the subject.
This is from one of the first ever articles we wrote on Wings, just a couple of weeks after the site’s launch way back in November 2011:
Depressingly, some people still don’t get it.
We’ll keep this one brief, because it’s a bank holiday. We asked our Panelbase poll of English voters this month who they thought – regardless of respondents’ own politics – was doing the best job of leading their party. These were the results, in descending order of perceived competence:
1. Nicola Sturgeon (SNP)
Net rating: -5
(32% good, 37% bad, 31% don’t know)
2. Arlene Foster (DUP)
Net rating: -5
(13% good, 18% bad, 69% don’t know)
3. Vince Cable (Lib Dem)
Net rating: -7
(21% good, 28% bad, 51% don’t know)
4. Theresa May (Con)
Net rating: -18
(34% well, 52% badly, 14% don’t know)
5. Jeremy Corbyn (Lab)
Net rating: -19
(32% well, 51% badly, 17% don’t know)
Not a single net positive, and it seems particularly telling (and grim) that the two at the very bottom of the list are the only ones with any chance of actually becoming Prime Minister – pending, Lord have mercy on us all, the arrival of Jacob Rees-Mogg – while the top two don’t even sit in the UK Parliament.
(Foster, in fact, doesn’t currently sit in ANY parliament.)
To be honest, readers, it’s a miracle British people bother to vote at all any more.
So it appears that Ruth Davidson has been lying again.
And as is so often the case, the lie is easy to expose.
Like most Scottish politics nerds we’re going to be spending the morning absorbing the report of the Sustainable Growth Commission. But while we do that, we’ve got more data from our Panelbase poll of English voters earlier this month, on what Scotland could expect in the future if it stays in the UK.
We told them: “Under a system known as the Barnett Formula, the government spends more money per head on people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than it does on people in England, because their populations are more thinly spread so it costs more money to provide the same services.”
And this was how they felt about that:
Michael Gove has been saying some words today, to the general astonishment of all.
Which seems like a good time to bring up some more data from our latest poll.
It’s been a very sluggish few months in Scottish politics news, with only the significant but rather dry matter of the Brexit power grab to talk about, so you’d imagine that the publication earlier this month of some important new statistics concerning the Scottish economy would have raised some media attention.
Yet fully three weeks after the figures were released we can’t locate a single word of coverage from any newspapers or broadcasters, and that’s odd.
After all, whenever some economic figures pop up showing Scotland in a bad light – especially when some financial thinktank has also passed comment – the press isn’t usually slow to jump all over them, so oh wait we see what’s happened here.
Perhaps go and take a look for yourself. Because you’ll grow very old waiting for the Scottish press to tell you about it.
After 27 unbroken pages of royal wedding “news” (following on from a full 46 in its Sunday edition), the Scottish Daily Mail finally gets down to reporting other stuff today.
“Union support rising”, eh? Do we have any numbers on that?
To the best of our recollection, today’s Sunday Politics Scotland was the first time a representative from this site has ever been invited onto a BBC Scotland TV show to discuss the affairs of the day since Wings was founded back in 2011. So we thought we better capture it for posterity in case it’s another seven years until the next one.
The bits that didn’t make it to air are below.
Which we were this morning, perhaps someone should tell David Mundell his.
Because he seems a little confused about it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
