Wings Over Scotland

As we were compiling our second poll, it struck us that it provided an opportunity to find out a lot of things about the Scottish public at once, that weren’t necessarily directly related to the referendum.

Politicians and newspapers routinely make all sorts of claims about what the public’s attitude to various issues are, but whenever we Google for polling data backing up those assertions it’s very thin on the ground, especially for Scotland specifically.

So as usual, we just went ahead and did it ourselves.

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As readers will know because we always go on about it, we’re not very fussed about straight Yes/No polls this far out from the vote. We want to get right under the Scottish electorate’s skin, so for our second crowd-funded poll (as with the previous one) we asked for their opinion on all sorts of other stuff too.

But the media is boring and only cares about the simple bits. Headlines first, then.

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SHOULD SCOTLAND BE AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY?

Yes 35%
No 43%
Undecided 20%

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Just an eight-point gap, which remains unchanged if you only include people who are at least 8/10 likely to vote – the numbers in that scenario move to Y37-N45-DK17. With the white paper still unpublished and 11 months to go, the Yes side needs a mere 4% swing to close the gap completely.

But that’s just about the least interesting stat in our poll.

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We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.

First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.

Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.

(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)

We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.

As all the cool, good-looking people who follow us on Twitter will already know, the results of our second crowd-funded poll are in. The data tables only arrived around teatime, so we won’t be publishing anything until Sunday, because we have to analyse a great big mountain of info, write some posts about it and get those posts cleared by Panelbase, all of which takes a wee while.

But allow us to offer you the odd little teaser snippet.

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We were a little confused as we caught up with our Twitter timeline this morning.

Brilliant result? What?

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We couldn’t be bothered staying up for the Dunfermline by-election result. Roughly 60 seconds into the coverage we switched over to Family Guy on BBC3, and then – faced with the unwelcome prospect of all the same old faces spouting all the same old guff as they filled dead air with deathly waffle for a few hours – we went to bed.

Since the disgraced Bill Walker’s resignation (if you can call it that, so unwillingly was he dragged out by the ankles), it’s been obvious that Labour would win, and you don’t stay up into the wee small hours watching a TV show you already know the end of.

So with the benefit of a new day’s eye, let’s have a wee delve.

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With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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We’ve been digging around behind the scenes for the last few days now trying to make sense of the labyrinthine tangle of claim and counter-claim over what’s going on at the Ineos refinery and petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth. The press is full of competing assertions from the various parties involved, so we’re just going to tell you what we know for sure and see where it ends up.

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Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk, 23 October 2013:

“The announcement by Ineos this morning that Grangemouth’s petrochemical plant is to close is terrible news. Hundreds of jobs lost directly, many more indirectly. The loss of a significant element of Scotland’s industrial capacity. Why has this happened?

Ineos has been flagging likely cuts for months but instead of engaging with the situation and organising a coherent plan to save jobs, Unite called a strike over a pathetic and petty issue related to Labour Party internal politics. By the time the union woke up to the reality workers faced, it was too late.”

Sounds about right to us. Mind how you vote tomorrow, Dunfermline folk.

We had a fascinating discussion on Twitter yesterday on the subject of lotteries. It was sparked by the latest cunning money-raising scheme by “Better Together”, in which they enlisted unsuccessful “Great British Bake-Off” contestant James Morton to solicit donations, with the lure of a free signed copy of his book (cover price £20) for five lucky draw winners who’d donated more than £10.

The only slight problem with the plan is that it’s against the law.

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We got slightly distracted yesterday by documenting some eye-popping Unionist madness, and completely forgot to finish our investigation into the Guardian’s odd claims that the Scottish Government had “delayed”, “softened” and “compromised” its stance on the removal of Trident from Scotland after independence, and that such a move betrayed nervousness over the feasibility of its goal of NATO membership.

We examined one piece by Severin Carrell, but the paper actually ran two by the same author on the same subject, and the second was just as inaccurate and misleading.

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And this one might just take the entire cake stand and banana hanger.

It’s former Tory MP and junior minister Edwina Currie, speaking about someone called “Alex Salmon” on Radio 5’s Stephen Nolan show on Saturday. (From 2h 16m on that iPlayer link.) We do recommend listening to all six-and-a-half minutes. It sets a very high standard from the off, but somehow maintains it the whole way through. Enjoy.