Wings Over Scotland

There’s another rather bizarre Kenny Farquharson column in today’s Times. Under the headline “Holyrood wasn’t built for a one-party state”, it asserts that “the Scottish Parliament is no longer fit for purpose” on the grounds that the opposition parties are useless, as if that were the fault of the electoral system rather than their leaders.

After that, though, it just gets flat-out insulting.

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Here’s Michelle Mone on last night’s Channel 4 News:

When presenter Matt Frei sympathetically puts to her that she left Scotland because she was being “given a very very hard time” by Yes/SNP supporters, Mone denies it, saying “I didn’t actually leave, that wasn’t the main reason to have left Scotland”.

So where could Frei have come by such a misapprehension?

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But you have to admit it has a ring of truth about it.

(From tonight’s Scotland 2015.)

Social media is alight today with the latest extraordinary opinion poll for next May’s Holyrood election, which puts the SNP on a record-breaking 62% to Labour’s 20%.

(The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats trail in with miserable stats of 12% and 3% respectively, which means that within the standard margin of polling error it’s possible that NOBODY in Scotland is still planning on voting Lib Dem.)

Pollsters TNS report the findings under what might in the circumstances be seen as the slightly negative headline “SNP holds poll lead in spite of mixed views on record in government”, which relates to figures concerning the Nats’ performance in power.

But there’s an interesting quirk in those numbers.

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Alert social-media users will have noticed that it’s hard to avoid a constant low-level buzzing from a faction of the Yes movement, calling on the next Scottish Government (in the event, as currently seems likely, that it’s another SNP majority) to issue a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI for short.

And in the context of achieving Scottish independence UDI is indeed the answer, if we assume that the question is “What’s the stupidest thing the SNP could possibly do?”

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There’s a comment piece by Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson in today’s Sunday Times, comprising 846 words which could be condensed into two: “SNP BAD”.

As such it could have been easily turned into a speech by any Scottish Labour leader of the last five years with nothing more than a quick search-and-replace of the words “Conservative” and “Labour”. It puts forward nothing remotely resembling a policy, just paragraphs of boilerplate waffle and a call for a debate.

Davidson professes to offer “a practical and pro-UK alternative to the SNP”, a programme which she boils down to two key components. It seems to have entirely escaped her notice that they contradict each other on the most fundamental level.

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“In an independent Scotland, we’ll never have to worry about Tory governments again”, said the man on my doorstep, his YES badge gleaming in the sunshine.

“I am a Tory,” said I, watching with some amusement as the man’s jaw dropped.

“But I’ll still be voting Yes,” I added.

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Yesterday, whatever the merits of the actual decision involved, we saw an admirable attitude to transparency and accountability from NHS Greater Glasgow And Clyde in their handling of our Freedom Of Information request about the renaming of the South Glasgow University Hospital. An extremely comprehensive response arrived promptly and without any attempts at evasion.

Today was different, because today we were dealing with the BBC.

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There’s much noisy chat at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn being 20 points ahead of his Labour leadership rivals on first-preference votes. His rivals seem to agree; they’ve turned their main efforts to competing amongst themselves for second and third preference “stop Corbyn” votes.

But could any of them really close such a huge gap? And what if they don’t?

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We couldn’t help but smile at the related tunes.

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Having failed over the course of several years to label the SNP “Nazis” and “fascists” (or, depending on which sort of newspaper you were reading, “Tartan Stalinists”), the party’s political and media opponents have a new(ish) meme to punt: that the SNP is a religious cult made up of credulous, fanatical zealots impervious to logic or facts.

The leader of this new front is right-wing columnist Alex Massie, who by our count has managed to flog someone this diatribe at least four times already this year – the most recent being in yesterday’s Times:

“With its group-think, blame culture and wilful blindness, the Teflon party has turned into a faith-based organisation”

But he’s far from alone.

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There’s been something of a resurgence recently in pundits bemoaning online abuse and saying “Yes, there are bad apples on both sides but the overwhelming majority of offenders are Yes supporters”.

The authors of such articles oddly choose to ignore the only statistical data so far in existence, which shows the opposite:

“In a worrying development for the Better Together campaign, 21 per cent of those planning to vote Yes have received abuse or threats compared to just eight per cent of those planning to vote No.”

It also seems not to occur to them that their own experience of abuse may be a result of their particular – real or perceived – partisan position. (Ours, for example, is that 98% comes from No voters, but then that WOULD be our experience because on the whole you tend to get abused by people who disagree with you, not your own side.)

So we expect they’ll ignore this inconvenient statistical data from our latest Panelbase poll too, but we’ll put it out there anyway, alongside the Express poll, for reference. It’s pretty much all you can do.

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