Wings Over Scotland

This week it was claimed by Stuart Adam, senior economic researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), that taxes would have to rise almost 14% in an independent Scotland, if they were the sole method used to fill the Scottish budget deficit.

It’s a dramatic headline, for sure. But is it an accurate reflection on the relative finances of an independent Scotland and one that remained part of the United Kingdom? As ever, you have to dig a little deeper to find out what’s really going on.

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If there’s one phrase that has long bedevilled the Liberal party and its descendants, it’s ‘home rule’. What are we supposed to understand by it? And perhaps more to the point, what do modern Lib Dems understand by it?

If you go back in Liberal history to the time of the great William Gladstone, ‘home rule’ meant something. It meant the principle of self-governance for Ireland, with certain powers reserved to Westminster.

Gladstone’s idea of home rule was very similar to what we now call Devo Max. And when Gladstone stood up for this principle and fought to drive it through parliament, he was attacked in terms we recognise only too well today.

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Just when you thought it was safe, we’ve got one last bit of data for you from our second Panelbase poll, which seems to have really grabbed the attention of the Scottish political world (as best observed in the furious, hysterical reaction from “Better Together” activists on Monday evening when Scotland Tonight announced they were going to be referencing it in the show).

We asked people a couple of questions about their voting intentions in various circumstances, but some of the most intriguing and revealing results came when we inquired as to how they planned to vote in the 2016 Scottish general election.

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During last month’s independence march and rally in Edinburgh we were outdoors, marching and rallying. (Duh.) So we obviously didn’t catch the teatime news, and when we got home we were intrigued to hear tales of some strange goings-on on BBC Scotland’s six o’clock TV bulletin.

The footage didn’t reappear on any later shows, so for several days we scoured the iPlayer, which had archived just about every news programme broadcast anywhere in Britain except that one. It never did show up, and it’s only thanks to the hard work of an alert reader that we’ve finally been able to get hold of it.

It’s well worth a view.

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For those of you who – inexplicably and frankly rather hurtfully – STILL don’t follow us on Twitter and may therefore not have heard the news yet on your gramophones, this evening’s Scotland Tonight promises to be a real treat.

Not so much for the fact that they’ll be referencing our poll, but because they’ll be doing so as the jumping-off point for a discussion between Dennis Canavan (chairman of Yes Scotland) and Ian Davidson MP, on the subject “Are undecided voters in the independence referendum more socialist, more republican, & more green?”, which should be like watching Rab C Nesbitt give David Bowie fashion tips.

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Something that Professor John Curtice said in an extensive and fair review of our second Panelbase poll today gave us some cause for thought.

It’s hardly a secret that the No campaign has spent just about every waking hour of its existence frantically trying to turn the referendum into one on the SNP and Alex Salmond in particular (despite the seemingly counter-productive nature of the tactic).

For all they’re worth, they try to present independence as being a proxy for a single political party, when in fact it’s the exact opposite – an attempt to restore Scotland to a meaningful democracy, rather than the stagnant one-party (Labour) state it’s been at every UK general election for the last 60 years.

And when we read Prof. Curtice’s article, it dawned on us that we now had the tools and the ammunition to blow that particular smear apart once and for all.

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The last of our poll data releases yesterday highlighted perhaps the biggest factor in deciding the outcome of the independence referendum – the views of the undecided. Cross-referencing those yet to make up their minds with the other questions in our survey tells us much about the arguments that will win or lose the vote.

So just before we make the full data tables available for any old Tom, Dick and Harry to peruse, here’s an exclusive early sight for the people who paid to make it happen.

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For our final instalment of poll data, we’re going to look at two groups of results that at first don’t appear to be connected, but which are more linked than you might imagine.

We’ll do the housekeeping first, to build the tension a bit. No skipping ahead.

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Both of our polls so far have been far less concerned with HOW people intend to vote in the independence referendum, and much more concerned with the WHY. So in the second one, we decided to have a bit of a dig around in their reasons, see what it was they really wanted, and what might change their minds.

We had no idea what to expect, but our respondents still managed to surprise us.

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In our previous poll, we discovered that the public overwhelmingly thought its politicians were a bunch of liars. Not a single one of them scored a net positive trust rating for truthfulness, although Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon had the small consolation of being well out in front of the competition as the least distrusted.

We felt a little bit sorry for the nation’s elected representatives, so we thought we’d give them a better chance this time around.

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Alert readers will recall that earlier today we revealed the answers to the first 10 questions we asked the Scottish public about their views on various topics not directly related to the independence referendum, just because we were asking them about stuff anyway and it seemed like a good idea.

Here, in a surprise twist, are the other 10.

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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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