Wings Over Scotland

Most of the Scottish media today reports the latest Lord Ashcroft poll, which found Nicola Sturgeon to be by a distance the most popular political leader in Scotland.

“Scots feel quite positive about Sturgeon”, said the Daily Record, while the Scotsman headline was “Poll shows Scots approve of Sturgeon’s performance” and the Herald went with “Poll reveals strong support for Sturgeon”.

All three opened with almost identical paragraphs observing that the First Minister was the only UK politician to record a net positive approval rating in Scotland, putting her a thumping 32 points ahead of her nearest domestic rival.

The Scottish Daily Mail, though, had a slightly different take.

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Conservative list MSP Murdo Fraser is Scottish politics’ undisputed king of rejects. He’s had a 16-year career in the Scottish Parliament without once winning any sort of election, trousering close to a million pounds of taxpayers’ money in the process, and there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do to get him out of it.

First of all he was firmly rejected by the electorate of East Lothian in 1997, picking up under 20% of the vote. Then when the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999 he tried his luck at winning its North Tayside seat and was rejected again. He had a go at the Westminster version of the seat in 2001, and was rejected there too.

He hadn’t managed to come in the top three of the Tory regional list either, but when one of the list MSPs who HAD been elected resigned later that year after a bout of pneumonia, Fraser got to walk into his vacant seat unopposed, elected by no-one.

He tried to win North Tayside again in 2003 and 2007, and was rejected both times. (In the four attempts he made at the seat, his vote share decreased every time. The more people saw of him serving as an MSP, the less they liked him.)

By 2011 North Tayside had been abolished and replaced by Perthshire North, which Fraser contested in that year and in 2016, but was rejected twice more. In between he stood for leader of the Scottish Conservatives, but was rejected by Tory members.

After eight humiliating failures out of eight, though, today Murdo finally won one.

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times, about a cunning plan by which the Scottish Government could bypass the veto of Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and legislate for a second independence referendum – forcing a direct showdown in which the UK government would have to openly trample the Scottish Parliament and its electoral mandate.

If pursued, it would reopen the current absurd argument in which the Unionist parties claim that the Scottish Government has no “mandate” to pursue a second referendum, despite mandates arising solely from the ability to win votes in Parliament.

(If an absolute majority for one party was required to pass legislation, Holyrood would of course have done absolutely nothing for most of its life.)

And that reminded us that our last Panelbase opinion poll was so vast we still hadn’t finished releasing the results of it, including one rather surprising finding.

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On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 March 2017)
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We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.

Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.

It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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The figure below is my own, but it’s also remarkably typical:

Click the pic to get yours.

(It actually feels like a lot more than that – quite possibly because I have, in fact, not for one minute of my entire life been represented by a government at Westminster – or anywhere else, come to that – that I voted for, unless you count the token presence of the Lib Dems in the 2010-15 coalition. Which I don’t, because they immediately betrayed every policy and principle for which I’d voted for them in the first place.)

For Scotland, democracy in the UK simply doesn’t work.

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One of the favourite sneering Unionist memes of the independence referendum was the mocking dismissal of claims by some Yes supporters that there might be “secret oil fields” in a location off the west of Shetland known as Clair Ridge.

So amused were the Unionists by this notion that they were still sniggering about it regularly years after the referendum, right up to earlier this month.

Curiously, they’ve gone a little quieter in recent days.

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As the Prime Minister prepares to meet the First Minister and doggedly give her “now is not the time” mantra another few dozen run-throughs for the cameras, we thought that you might enjoy a little trip down Memory Lane.

Ah, the old days.

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No.10: Jackie Kemp, journalist.

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