Wings Over Scotland

Ruth Davidson opened First Minister’s Questions yesterday with an attack on the Scottish Government over the performance of the NHS, citing a report that the service faced “pockets of meltdown” this winter.

But later in the session, alert backbench SNP MSP Clare Haughey claimed that the report being quoted by the Tory leader had only in fact examined THREE Scottish hospitals. So we thought we’d better check.

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Readers may have noted that Scottish Labour’s complaints about the delay in opening the new Forth Bridge have been uncharacteristically subdued.

It is, after all, rarely difficult to distinguish the branch office from a cuddly fluffy bunny made of candyfloss and children’s smiles. But this time we may know why.

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We thought it’d be worth making a timeline of Hampden on Saturday for posterity.

Because a lot of nonsense is being talked on all sides. This is the reality.

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We’re still on a break. But we’ve had another response from the BBC.

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The Sunday Herald, which enjoyed a major sales boost from being the first Scottish newspaper to officially back independence but has since seen its circulation increase partly eroded, has this morning chosen to throw a stick of dynamite onto the fire.

The paper’s front page today teases a double-page spread inside with the headline “SPECIAL REPORT: HOW INDEPENDENCE SUPPORTERS SHOULD USE THEIR SECOND VOTE”. And then things get a little strange.

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Last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Times gave an article to a Green activist and party worker – not billed as such, even though until last month he was on the party’s regional candidate list for Lothian – to predict that the Greens would get 10 seats at next month’s election.

Much campaigning by the various fringe parties for the Holyrood contest has been based on “seat predictors” like the one deployed to produce the figures in the piece, purporting to show that a tactical-voting strategy on the list can deliver a large gain in numbers of pro-independence MSPs compared to using both votes for the SNP.

We’ve examined that argument in considerable depth already, both theoretical and practical. But its also worth noting that so-called “seat predictors” are a rather shaky basis for making such bold forecasts.

Let’s illustrate that assertion.

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From the Scotsman tonight:

As previously, we’re having quite a lot of trouble understanding the difference between “independence” (39%), and “the Scottish Parliament should make all the decisions for Scotland” (51%). We’re going to drop the SSAS a line and see if they’ll ask for us.

A significant groundswell of opinion, perhaps:

Oddly, the Scotsman’s report on the story contains not a single further piece of data about how numerous these opponents of a second referendum are.

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BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.

While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.

And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.

So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.

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During the independence referendum campaign, we catalogued numerous breaches of the law for which the “Better Together” campaign was let off with a slap on the wrist, from data protection to running unlicensed lotteries. Today several papers report that the official No campaign has been fined £2000 by the Electoral Commission for failing to document £57,000 of its expenditure during the campaign.

Alert readers will no doubt recall the explosion of glee from Unionists in the press and on social media last October when this site was fined £750 for being late with some of its own documentation, and we assumed that much the same thing had happened with BT, but on closer examination the story appears to be rather different.

Rather than simply missing the deadline for providing receipts or invoices for specific items of spending, “Better Together” appears, going by the report in the Herald, to not have accounted for the money at all.

And that’s slightly concerning.

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An alert reader recently decided to get a bit meta and send an FOI request to the BBC about how many FOI requests it got, and how many it responded to with its standard get-out clause that basically amounts to “None of your business, get stuffed”.

This was the response. We’ve added the percentages in red.

You just pay for it, under penalty of law. It doesn’t answer to you.

Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.

Here’s what we’ve got so far.

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