Wings Over Scotland

We’ve commented before on the odd way that newspapers can reveal their bias in the way they phrase their reporting, rather than in the actual content of it, which can be entirely factually accurate. As we noted, a particular giveaway is the angle from which they view statistics, and especially opinion polls.

A poll showing 35% of people backing independence will almost always be reported as “ONLY a third back Yes”, whereas one with the exact same numbers for a different question might be presented as “OVER a third distrust Alex Salmond”. The proportion “one third” is in such a manner portrayed as being both a small and a large one, to suit whatever position the publication wishes to promote.

It’s in such a context that we invite readers to ponder today’s Mail On Sunday.

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As alert readers know, we don’t get ourselves overly excited about individual opinion polls, even when they’re like today’s Survation one showing a big 5.5% swing to Yes in the wake of George Osborne’s intervention on a currency union last week.

What we DO like to ponder is the more interesting data buried in such surveys.

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We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.

The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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Isn’t it weird how since we did this, everyone’s suddenly started asking much more interesting questions in opinion polls about independence?

After months with almost no polling at all, and what there was being restricted to boring Yes/No affairs, there’s been an explosion in surveys conducted by every conceivable pollster for everyone and his dog, and nearly every one has followed our lead in digging below the headline response and trying to find out what makes Scottish voters tick when it comes to their views on the constitution.

Today has two new sets of data to chew over, with fascinating results.

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Alert readers will doubtless have spotted the news that the UK government is to press ahead with the sell-off of the Royal Mail. After all, with brutal job cuts under both Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments having put over 50,000 people out of work in recent years the post is now not just viable but profitable, and we couldn’t possibly have hundreds of millions of pounds in annual profits flowing back into the Treasury’s hands to provide public services for taxpayers when they could be flogged to private companies to enrich the wealthy.

The sale is overwhelmingly opposed by Royal Mail employees, and by the public at large, across party boundaries. But it’s far from unique in that regard. It’s just hard to see how anything can be done about it.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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We’ll be brief about the Eastleigh by-election result.

For all sorts of reasons.

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We should get one thing straight from the start: the only thing on Earth more tedious than a conspiracy theorist is a conspiracy denier. For every swivel-eyed nutter you find shouting hysterically that the government and royal family are 12-foot-tall shape-shifting lizards from space, there’ll be an equally (but differently) dim-witted Pollyanna at the other end glibly sniggering about “tinfoil hats” and rubbishing the mad notion that a group of people might ever get together and covertly seek to achieve an aim.

Because the history of humanity is the history of conspiracies. From Guy Fawkes to various military coups, revolutions and civil wars to the burning of the Reichstag and right up to the present day, mankind’s records are littered with events which, had anyone actually warned of them before they happened, would have been dismissed by smug idiots as the deranged fantasies of the comically paranoid.

As recently as last year we saw one right here in our very own country, when the South Yorkshire police were found to have perpetrated a co-ordinated, decades-long cover-up over the Hillsborough tragedy. Yet like moths which keep flying into lightbulbs over and over again in the irrational hope that THIS time they’ll turn into the moon, we stubbornly refuse to entertain – indeed, openly mock – even the abstract possibility that anyone in a position of power might ever be up to no good.

So, then, to the Scottish media.

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We’ve raised this subject before, but it was brought to mind again by a conversation we had on Twitter last night and this morning, and it never gets any less relevant. Opinion polls are tricky things. Let’s just remind ourselves of a few:

Who do you trust to act in Scotland’s best interests?
Scottish Government: 71%
UK Government: 18%

(Source: here. Also reported in Scotsman subsidiary Fife Today, but mysteriously now completely vanished from the internet.)

Which decisions about Scotland should be made by Holyrood?
All of them: 43%
The same ones as now: 21%

(Source: here, table A1. A “devo-max” option scored 29%.)

Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes: 28%
No: 48%

(Source: here, although see here.)

Alert readers will of course have noticed (again) that these three questions are in fact all the same as each other. They all describe independence. Yet the answers are radically different. Scottish voters trust the Scottish Parliament to act in their best interests vastly more than they trust the UK Parliament. They think it should make all decisions about the governance of Scotland. Yet ask them if they want to vote to make that exact thing happen, and they change their minds completely.

There’s clearly a serious democratic disconnect here. What to do?

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This site’s primary purpose is the provision of facts. We want to persuade people of the merits of independence, but we want to do it with the truth, which is why we have a conspicuous policy of providing links whenever we make factual assertions. That often means criticising other media when it adopts a more lax approach to upholding proper journalistic standards, whether we like that media or not.

Last night’s Scotland Tonight repeatedly made a casual assertion about opinion polls on independence which, as we’ll see in a moment, was simply untrue. We make, and intend, no suggestion that they did so from malice or bias. We’re just pointing out that they got it wrong, so that people will be armed with the correct facts.

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On the one hand, there’s this, from Michael Kelly in the Scotsman on Thursday:

“Fatal errors made by Alex Salmond this year have ruined his chances of a 2014 referendum victory. The year of reversal for the cause of independence – that’s how 2012 will be recorded in footnotes to the political history of the United Kingdom.

The SNP tries to convince us that the new Scotland will be the same, only better – dependent independence. That is the fatal flaw, the fundamental inconsistency that has ensured the failure of the SNP’s only real policy. Fat ladies don’t sing in tragedies, but the chorus has begun to lament the fall of the hero. It’s all over bar the shouting.”

And on the other, there’s this, from PoliticalBetting.com in mid-February 2011:

“Unless all opinion polls are utterly wrong in Scotland, Labour will be comfortably the largest party in the Scottish Parliament post-May 5th. Labour should either win outright or come fairly close. Iain Gray will probably form a new Scottish Government. His decision is likely to be whether to go it alone or to invite the remaining Scottish Lib Dems to join him.”

Aside from comedy idiots like Kelly, though, a great many more sober commentators have also been proclaiming 2012 as a terrible year of catastrophe for the Yes campaign – by which they usually explicitly or implicitly mean its chief protagonists, the SNP. Yet for all the disasters which they allege have befallen the independence movement – the great patriotic celebrations of the Jubilee and Olympics, the supposed unravelling of SNP policy on Europe, the dogged personal smearing of Alex Salmond and his cabinet – what’s actually happened to the polling figures for independence?

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