As alert readers will know, we’ve just done another Panelbase opinion poll. You’ll be hearing more about the results over the next couple of days, but we thought we’d give you the headline finding first.

The most interesting thing about those numbers is that as far as we can make out that’s the highest Yes figure Panelbase has ever returned for that question. (The last two times, for the Sunday Times in September and July, both came out 47-53.)
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Tags: poll
Category
analysis, scottish politics, stats

Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
Tags: cartoonsChris Cairns
Category
scottish politics, uk politics
And has no more luck this week with hapless Scottish Labour list MSP Claire Baker than he did with her habitually mendacious colleague Jackie Baillie last week:
(The Big Debate, BBC Radio Scotland, 13 November 2015)
.
Brewer’s weary sigh at 2m 14s speaks volumes.
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Tags: arithmetic fail
Category
audio, idiots, scottish politics
One of the stranger criticisms regularly levelled at this site is that we don’t attack the SNP/Scottish Government enough.

That’s weird firstly because it’s not like there’s currently a shortage of hostile media scrutiny of Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues, and secondly because we’ve never in our four-year life claimed for a moment to be neutral.
But the reality is far more nuanced than that.
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Category
analysis, audio, comment, scottish politics
Below is an article taken from the UK media today about the Scotland Bill.

Give it a read through, and pay attention. There’ll be a very short quiz at the end.
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.
Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.
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Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, scum, uk politics, video
Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.
Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.

So we thought we’d see if it was true.
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Tags: Lindsay Bruce
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, world
We saw this tweet from Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson yesterday:

And we were quite confused.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
media, scottish politics
When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.
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Tags: and finallyarithmetic failmisinformation
Category
comment, idiots, scottish politics, wtf
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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Category
history, navel-gazing, reference, scottish politics, stats

Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
Tags: cartoonsChris Cairns
Category
scottish politics