Wings Over Scotland

With the greatest of reluctance, and only in the absence of anything even remotely more interesting, then, let’s have a few words on Scottish Labour’s latest solemn and sincere declaration of its full, total, complete and utter autonomy.

Because while the media is reporting the development that UK Labour has decided to extend a few extra inches of lead to Kezia Dugdale’s branch office as if it had the slightest importance to anything, it seems oddly reluctant to ask the obvious question.

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Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:

It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?

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The Sunday Times has a new Panelbase poll out today, and it borrows a question that was first asked by this website (via the same pollster) 14 months ago. These were the results this month:

They broadly show little change from when we asked last year (for the five options the changes are +1, 0, -3, +8 and -5), suggesting that the main practical upshot of the EU referendum campaign was to halve the number of Don’t Knows, which was achieved by shifting almost all of them straight onto the Leave side with the Remain camp’s abysmal recreation of Better Together’s “Project Fear”.

Nevertheless, the chart is a fascinating and pertinent one. Because while there’s only one of the four non-DK groups in the list who definitely can’t get what they want, there’s another one whose decision will be a lot harder than Yes supporters would like.

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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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The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.

But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.

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We’ve been poring over the fascinating document released yesterday by the Fraser Of Allander Institute, examining in detail the prospects for the Scottish Government’s budget in the coming years.

Admittedly at first we were chiefly doing it in order to embarrass the increasingly angry and belligerent BBC presenter Andrew Neil, who insisted repeatedly last year that there’d been no real-terms cut to the Holyrood budget since the Tories came to power.

That claim put Neil at odds with all manner of people pointing out that the opposite was true, to which we can now add the FoAI:

But we already knew Andrew Neil was an idiot, so that was no big deal. It was another chart in the document that caught our eye and made us think.

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The old rules (NB these apply to us):

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Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen had a quite extraordinary meltdown on Twitter last night and this morning after we highlighted an appalling article that she’d written for Saturday’s paper.

After angrily attacking other users for a few hours, by the end she’d declared a full-on DefCon One, sending out a desperate plea for hauners from entities as diverse as the Times, the New York Times, the Telegraph, the NUJ, the Washington Post, Guardian Scotland, BBC Radio 4, the Drudge Report, the CEO of Twitter and JK Rowling.

At the time of writing, none had replied.

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We’ve already highlighted the abominable state of the Daily Express this week, but an article in today’s edition is surely some sort of record-breaking low.

Hold onto your hats, folks, you won’t believe this one.

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The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:

It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.

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Supporters of Scottish independence have known for years that the civic “nationalism” espoused by the Yes movement bears no relation to the so-called “blood and soil” varieties found in many other countries. Every racist or ethnic-nationalist organisation in Britain – the BNP, the EDL/SDL, the National Front and so on – was stridently No.

But a YouGov poll released today puts numbers on it for the first time.

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