Wings Over Scotland

We’ve still got a few of the results from our last Panelbase poll (conducted last month) to round up, and this one seems pertinent this week:

As has been the case ever since we started asking this question about the nation’s twin constitutional dilemmas back in July 2015, the single most popular option in a four-way choice remains an independent Scotland inside the EU, which leads the impending reality (a UK Scotland outside the EU) by a clear 10 points.

Scotland isn’t merely about to get something it doesn’t want, it’s about to get the exact opposite of the thing it wants most. But oh boy, is it ever more complicated than that.

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Firstly, our congratulations to Her Majesty’s Government (pictured below) on its setting last night of a new world record in incompetence.

We can’t see it being beaten in a long time. But Jesus, what now?

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Just you wait and see.

Scottish political pundits: they’ve got all the pieces in their hands, but they still haven’t even worked out that it’s a jigsaw.

We haven’t talked much on Wings about the court case currently in progress against former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, for hopefully obvious reasons.

The case is currently “in avizandum” – legal jargon for “the sheriff is considering his decision” – and a result is hoped for around the end of this month, and while as far as we know there’s no actual rule against talking about it at this stage, if you’re one of the participants it’s probably not the greatest idea as a general principle.

But what CAN be discussed is a much wider issue which it touched on, as highlighted by Daily Record columnist Anna Burnside while talking about the case during last week’s BBC Radio Scotland media review on the John Beattie Show.

The debate had a fully balanced panel: Burnside, who thought I was an awful person, Stuart Cosgrove, who thought I was an awful person with a sometimes-good website, and Anne Marie Watson, who thought I was an awful person. But it was Burnside who really went in with the boot, as can be heard from 2m 27s on the clip below.

(The John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 28 March 2019)
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Let’s take a walk through that.

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Alert readers may have noticed that the deadline for the Conservative Party to respond to our formal query about their fake indyref 2 “petition” was about to expire (today, in fact), but fear not, compliance fans – at the eleventh hour a reply was received.

This is it:

So we’ve asked the obvious question.

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After running a minor post about poll results this morning to pass the time between Brexit fiascos, we got a bit engrossed – as we’re wont to do now and again – in some stats. Because the Labour Party in Scotland has been in a seemingly inexorable slide into irrelevance for a good few years now, and seems completely unable to find itself  a supremo capable of stopping the rot.

But with our customary diligence, we’ve discovered their secret star player.

Because somewhat to our surprise, it turns out that the most successful Scottish Labour leader of the past 20 years is… Alex Rowley.

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We were just going through our last Panelbase poll this morning looking to round up findings we hadn’t yet published when we suddenly noticed an odd thing.

We had of course previously observed that the Scottish Labour branch office manager Pritchard Leopold (SUB: PLEASE CHECK) wasn’t terribly well known in the nation, with barely over a third of Scots able to pick his name out of a list when prompted, despite a year and a half in the job.

But then we spotted something curious about the numbers.

Because the sub-party’s pseudo-leader was recognised more by voters of EVERY other party than he was by his own. While just 37% of Labour voters from the last election knew who he was, a whopping 61% of Lib Dems did, along with 51% of Tories and 41% of SNP supporters.

Or put another way: the more people could identify him as leader, the less likely they were to vote for his party.

And particularly when the extremely underwhelming act you have to follow is Kezia Dugdale, we’re pretty sure that can’t be a good thing.

So there was a football match at the weekend.

At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.

But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?

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Billions of years from now, when the Sun finally dies and expands to swallow and burn up the Earth in a final cataclysmic explosion, the very last thing to turn to dust and atoms will be Scottish Labour’s brass neck.

Coming from The Eternal Abstainers themselves that’s already quite a breathtakingly hypocritical claim, but if you look at last night’s results closely it gets a lot worse.

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Wings Over Scotland isn’t the only website dedicated to scrutinising the truthfulness of things claimed by politicians and media pundits. There’s the widely-respected and diligent FullFact.org, there’s Scotland’s own The Ferret, and there’s the BBC’s Reality Check (which frequently takes the more unconventional approach of, er, not making a finding either way about what the reality of things is).

And then there’s Channel 4’s FactCheck, which we’re going to generously assume had a liquid lunch yesterday and was a little under the weather.

Because not only is the conclusion that it reached on the subject of an independent Scotland having to use the Euro utter nonsense that’s been debunked roughly 1000 times in the last six years, it doesn’t even agree with itself.

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This was the Scottish Tories two years ago, when Scotland’s economy registered a small downturn for a single quarter, which was definitely the SNP’s fault:

Shall we find out what actually happened, readers?

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