There’s been a veritable flurry of polls commissioned to mark the impending one-year anniversary of the independence referendum. In the last 48 hours alone we’ve seen ones from Survation, YouGov and Panelbase, making a variety of interesting findings. As ever, though, the trick is in the interpretation.
Summer is, as we’ve said before, the “silly season” for politics. Wings readers will have noticed that like everywhere else, we’ve been rather lighter on content than usual for the last three months as politicians celebrated their general election victories by giving themselves long holidays – sorry, “time for constituency work” – and in the absence of a referendum campaign to fill the gap there wasn’t much going on.
So we can’t blame the media for raking over old ground in search of anything to fill threadbare column inches with. But it’s less excusable when the things they choose to reheat, repackage and reissue are ancient, endlessly-disproven lies.
Let’s start off by losing some more friends. This site has no time for the Gaelic lobby. The obsolete language spoken by just 0.9% of Scotland’s population might be part of the nation’s “cultural heritage”, but so were burning witches and replacing Highlanders with sheep and we don’t do those any more either.
Being multilingual is an excellent thing, but the significant amount of time and effort taken to learn a literally-pointless second language (because everyone you can talk to in Gaelic already understood English) would be vastly better directed to picking up one that was actually of some use, and every extra fraction of a second spent scanning a road sign trying to find the bit you can read is a fraction of a second spent with your eyes off the road.
Non-primary native languages are a tool whose main utility in practice is at best the exclusion of outsiders, and at worst an expression of dodgy blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism. They’re a barrier to communication and an irritation to the vast majority of the population, who are made to feel like uncultured aliens in their own land.
But we’d still rather put up with Gaelic than complete idiots making our laws.
Stat-pummelled readers will be glad to know that this is the last article we plan to write about the vagaries of the AMS electoral system, and how it might apply to next year’s Scottish Parliament election, for some time. This one also shouldn’t be full of tables and figures, so strap yourself in and let’s get this job finished.
We’ve only ourselves to blame, we’d be the first to admit. When we titled yesterday’s piece “AMS for lazy people” it was pretty much an invitation for people to get us to do their research for them, and so it proved.
Even as we slumped exhausted over a red-hot calculator, several readers wasted no time demanding a breakdown of how the mechanisms of the electoral system had affected last year’s European elections, in which UKIP defied some expectations (and delighted the Unionist parties and media) by taking a seat in Scotland.
So we suppose we might as well.
The email we’ve had more than any other since the 8th of May is this one:
“Please can you explain how the Scottish election system works, and whether it’s a good idea for me as an SNP voter to give my list vote to someone else so as to ensure the maximum number of pro-Yes MSPs in Holyrood?”
We’d planned to leave that question until much nearer the relevant time, but to be honest we’re getting fed up of reading them, so let’s see if we can sort it out now.
Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.
Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.
The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.
Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.
There’s been something of a resurgence recently in pundits bemoaning online abuse and saying “Yes, there are bad apples on both sides but the overwhelming majority of offenders are Yes supporters”.
The authors of such articles oddly choose to ignore the only statistical data so far in existence, which shows the opposite:
It also seems not to occur to them that their own experience of abuse may be a result of their particular – real or perceived – partisan position. (Ours, for example, is that 98% comes from No voters, but then that WOULD be our experience because on the whole you tend to get abused by people who disagree with you, not your own side.)
So we expect they’ll ignore this inconvenient statistical data from our latest Panelbase poll too, but we’ll put it out there anyway, alongside the Express poll, for reference. It’s pretty much all you can do.
From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:
It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?
The battle-cry of right-wing Labour apologists all this week has been “realism”. It’s all very well people like Jeremy Corbyn having crazy old principles about what Labour is supposed to stand for, runs the argument, but you can’t argue with public opinion and public opinion is desperate for Labour to become Tories with a slightly softer edge.
“Mental John” McTernan, for example, told the readers of the Telegraph yesterday that Labour’s disastrous, shambolic abstention on the welfare reform bill was the right thing to do because the party “had to show the public it got the message over welfare”.
But what actually IS the public’s message on welfare?
After last night’s debacle in the House Of Commons, various Labour activists and cheerleaders have been scrambled on social and print media to firefight the appalled reaction from voters on the left to the party’s abstention on the Tory welfare bill.
And as usual, they’re talking cobblers.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
