A variant on the story below appears in most of the right-wing press today.
That’s the Daily Mail version, which is the most detailed. The Express’s reporting was similar. But in order to manufacture a grievance on behalf of UKIP and the Tories, every paper which covers the story is required to torture the data beyond all reason.
Careful now.
(Polls here.)
So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?
Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?
We’ve been quiet today because we’ve been wading through the 80-odd painfully-dry pages of the Labour 2015 election manifesto, folks. It’s a deeply tedious read – screeds and screeds of waffly text about how nice things are nice and good things are good but bad things are bad. A couple of things did jump out, though. Here’s one.
Alert readers will of course recall that the party’s solemn pledge in Scotland is to provide 1000 more nurses (hastily revised from the comical “1000 more than whatever the SNP say”) from the proceeds of the Mansion Tax, even though NHS Scotland is devolved and no Westminster government can in fact hire a single Scottish nurse.
But hang on. Something’s not right about those numbers.
A super-alert reader pointed out something about today’s Sunday Politics that we hadn’t noticed. Before the galaxy-class trainwreck that was the Scottish leaders’ debate, the networked section of the show had a piece on Scottish polling, and our eagle-eyed viewer spotted that the chart of projected seats wasn’t in proportion.
So we measured, and this is what it should have looked like.
The very few readers who don’t immediately just snort and turn the page when they see the words “George Foulkes” may have noticed in yesterday’s Herald that the thirsty peer could be found gloating gleefully that had Scotland voted for independence last September it would now be “bankrupt” due to the decline in oil prices.
We can’t be bothered pointing out for the 500th time that a Yes vote wouldn’t have seen Scotland actually independent until March 2016, and that the oil price NOW is therefore about as relevant to anything as, well, Baron Foulkes himself.
But we couldn’t help noticing a couple of small arithmetical details.
We haven’t done a monthly stats post for a few months, partly because naturally traffic’s been down after the insane spike of last September, partly because we had two weeks off in October (and a semi-break over Christmas and New Year), and partly because we’ve moved to new, more accurate and more detailed figures direct from our webhost and January was the first full month of them.
So here, for those of you who like to keep track, are the headlines:
We’re pretty blown away by that, to be honest. A tiny fraction shy of 300,000 unique readers (in what’s traditionally a very slow month for politics, and one we didn’t really start until the second week) is 157% up on a year ago, and nearly 50,000 higher than last May, which was the all-time high until the mad last few weeks of the referendum campaign. (It’s the 3rd-highest ever, after September and August 2014.)
If you’d told us we’d be anywhere near those sorts of numbers four months after a No vote (or indeed if we’d even still be going four months after a No vote), we’d have said you were missing a few marbles. But as long as you’re still here, we will be too*.
…is eternal vigilance, chums. Turn your back on Unionists and the media – for the sake of argument we’ll say that’s two things – for a second and they’ll start trying to slip lies out into the public consciousness, from which place they’re notoriously hard to dislodge. (Kim Jong-Un’s mythical Scottish restaurant is a recent case in point. It’s now a comedy staple, despite having been completely fabricated.)
So it’s always worth keeping a close eye on this site’s dear old pal, Labour candidacy hopeful and media favourite Duncan Hothersall, for an early sight of which falsehoods the party will be trying to propagate next.
Alert readers may recall this baffling story from last month, in which we discovered that Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie hadn’t been able to think of any more pressing issues to occupy himself with than finding out how many times Scottish Government civil servants had accessed Wings Over Scotland in the six months leading up to the referendum.
So we were intrigued when we got an email from a viewer who just for fun had sent a Freedom of Information request to Holyrood and asked them the same question for the official Scottish and UK Liberal Democrats websites. The results are below.
So far in our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK we’ve found that while there can be very sizeable gaps between Scottish public opinion and that elsewhere, it mostly tends to be within the same side of the debate – for example, rUK citizens are much keener on retaining the monarchy and nuclear weapons than Scots are, but Scots do still favour both.
Our final round-up off the poll findings, though, focuses on the three questions we asked where the differences DID cross the divide.
For our next grab-bag of data from our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK, let’s take a look at some things where Scottish people converge and diverge from their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts. It’ll be something to do.
We apologise if the results of our twin social-attitudes polls of both Scotland and the rUK have been a little depressing so far, readers.
Depending on how you choose to look at things (and where you live), this next tranche of data is going to either cheer you up a little bit or make you feel even worse.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
