Wings Over Scotland

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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We’ve made some progress. It’s just three days since we outlined a question that all the leaders of the Unionist parties should be asked, and we have our first answer. An alert reader emailed it to Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, and to his credit he gave a quick, straight and unequivocal response. This is it:

“I don’t like addressing too many hypothetical situations but in this case let me be clear. If we voted to leave the EU then I would still vote to remain in the UK. I am very pro European and will campaign to remain in the EU. In the disappointing situation of Brexit I would not seek to heap more division on that divisive situation.”

Now it’s Kezia Dugdale of Scottish Labour and Ruth Davidson of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To The SNP Anti-Referendum Party’s turn. We’re sure that if any of their constituents were to drop them a line, they’d be equally forthcoming.

Dismayingly, this magnificent piece of virtuoso television interviewing from last night’s Scotland Tonight doesn’t appear to have been recorded in full splendid isolation for posterity anywhere, so it would be a grave failure of duty on our part not to preserve it for those viewers unfortunate enough to have been otherwise engaged.

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Not so very long ago, someone said this:

Of course, it’s not that day any more.

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SNP tax plans simultaneously raise £300m and lose £900m:

The Guardian’s daily sale in Scotland: 8,700 copies and falling.

A reader directed us today to a tweet by one of the most consistently abusive Tory trolls on social media, slightly concerned about whether his gleeful assertion of a 12% drop in SNP support had any grain of truth to it.

If you’re in a hurry, the short answer is “No”.

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We tried to ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show, presented by Louise White, this morning in order to ask Ruth Davidson a question, but because we’re not Scottish Labour activist Scott Arthur (who appears on air most weeks, including both today’s and yesterday’s shows) we didn’t get picked, as we normally don’t.

It was a shame, as the question we wanted to ask was a good one – and also an entirely genuine one that we honestly don’t know the answer to. Furthermore, it’s a question that applies equally well to all three Unionist party leaders, so we’ll be trying to phone in and ask them too when they in turn appear on the programme.

We rather suspect we won’t get through unless we change our name, though, so if anyone else is interested in the answer perhaps they might like to try their luck too on behalf of everyone, whether it’s on the Radio Scotland phone-in or any other event where the public are allowed to question the leaders.

So the question is below.

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It’s a rare occasion when we feel compelled to salute Scotland’s mainstream media, but their restraint on discovering that a whole slew of PFI schools commissioned by Labour might be in danger of falling down at any moment was highly commendable.

Restricting themselves merely to excising all mention of Labour from their coverage, the press admirably refused to somehow contort the issue into a shape that could be used to attack the SNP.

They kept temptation at bay for a solid 24 hours before they cracked.

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The Unionist parties are taking such a kicking in the polls for next month’s Holyrood election that you could forgive them for not always knowing where they were.

The above tweet does indeed have the potential to be “astonishing”, given that (a) Ruth Davidson isn’t standing in Carnoustie, and (b) the 2011 result suggests that there are only around 700 Labour voters to find in the entire town behind the “1000s” of doors that 20 Tories have impressively managed to knock by teatime.

(Indeed, the area is so Labour-unfriendly that the Tories actually managed to come 2nd five years ago, getting over 50% more votes than the Labour candidate.)

But it’s not the only piece of geographical confusion afflicting the UK parties.

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Alert readers may recall that a few months ago the Scottish press got itself in a right old lather about a temporary closure of the Forth Road Bridge. The SNP were attacked relentlessly in the media for what a subsequent inquiry in fact found to have been an “unforeseeable” fault on the bridge which posed no risk to life. But fair enough.

This week, 17 schools in the Edinburgh area were closed down over fears that they might be unsafe after the wall of one of them fell off in high winds, two years after another wall in an Edinburgh school collapsed and killed a 12-year-old girl.

All 17 had been built under a controversial PFI scheme signed in 2001, when the UK government, Scottish Parliament and Edinburgh City Council were all controlled by Labour, and which isn’t due to be finally paid off for another 20 years.

You know where this is going, right?

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The Scottish press and opposition’s incandescent and somewhat vague fury at the Scottish Government working to bring billions of pounds in investment to Scotland has continued undiminished in this weekend’s newspapers. Scottish Labour in particular are getting themselves very worked up about today’s Sunday Times.

“Incredible”? Sounds exciting. Let’s find out more.

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Poor old Daily Record.

What a distance to fall.

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