Wings Over Scotland

For ages now it’s been nagging at us that there wasn’t a quick and easy reference point for all the opinion polls we’ve commissioned, listing all the subjects covered by each poll and linking to both our own analyses of the figures and the raw data tables for people who wanted to go delving in amongst the stats themselves.

So now there is – it’s here. (And in future you can easily locate it under “Polls” in the menu bar running across the top of the front page.) We’re off for a bit of a lie down.

So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

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Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

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As we were poking around with this, we thought it’d be useful to have all the basic donations and spending information about the referendum in one place. It’s normally scattered around different places and hard to access easily, and it’s quite interesting.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We’ll never tire of documenting the Daily Record’s increasingly panicked attempts to get David Cameron to enact the Record’s dodgy promise of last September and save it from having to answer for the pup it sold Scotland.

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Amazingly enough, the Scottish press today ISN’T wall-to-wall with stories about Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, UK peer and lawmaker, endorsing the “f***ing booting” of Conservative supporters at the weekend, in a striking contrast to when a young SNP candidate said similar but less offensive things some months ago.

(Lord McConnell’s friends were talking in the future tense about something they would do. Mhairi Black was talking in the past tense, about things which she HADN’T done.)

As far as we’ve seen, the small piece above in the Scottish Sun is the only coverage. (The Daily Record, as well as not reporting the McConnell comments at all, actually has another go at Mhairi Black instead.)

But we were having trouble recalling any “hate-filled violent mobs” (McConnell’s actual full quote) on the Yes/SNP side. And so was an alert reader who had a dig through the papers from the last couple of years.

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Like some sort of out-of-control, unstoppable lying machine, Scottish Labour keep telling the electorate that the party with the most seats in a hung parliament is the one that forms the government, and that the only way to prevent the Conservatives from returning to power is for Labour to be the biggest party.

They’ve been saying it for weeks. They say it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, almost as if it’s all they’ve got.

The trouble is that an awful lot of people seem to disagree with them.

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Credit is due to those of the Scottish media who have taken up this site’s challenge to ask Labour the key question of the 2015 election debate in Scotland – “Are Labour prepared to form a government if they’re not the largest party in a hung parliament?”

(Because if the answer is yes then Labour’s entire Scottish election strategy – “Vote SNP get Tories!” – crumbles to dust, and if it’s no then Labour is saying that it’d be prepared to abandon not just Scotland but the whole UK to another five years of Conservative government purely out of spite against the SNP.)

Three of the party’s elected representatives have now been asked the question on air – James Kelly MSP by John Mackay of Scotland Tonight a week ago, branch office leader Jim Murphy by BBC Scotland’s Gary Robertson yesterday, and the shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran last night (below), again by STV’s John Mackay.

As you can see, Scotland’s voters still await an answer. But on this page we’ll keep track of all the swerves, evasions and dodges until we get one, if we ever do.

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Because we took a short break over the weekend, we sadly missed Labour’s solemn commemorations of the 1979 confidence vote, and as a result we don’t know whether anyone actually did don a black armband or lay a wreath to remember the miners that Labour didn’t support when they went on strike a few years later.

But an alert reader did find this for us.

It’s an extract from BBC reporter John Sergeant’s book “Maggie: Margaret Thatcher – Her Fatal Legacy” and you can read more of it below.

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