We’re having a lot of trouble with this one, to be honest.
The Record, along with Scottish Labour and a lot of the left of social media, are up in arms that a mystery benefactor has donated a £230,000 Rolls Royce to Glasgow City Council for the use of the Lord Provost. But nobody can quite manage to explain why they’re so angry about it.
November 2009: “at the end of the day the banks will be paying money to the British people and not the other way round”.
Shall we take a look through the arched-eyebrows window, readers?
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?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
