Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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*.

Read the rest of this entry →

…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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Having found to our dismay that both Scots and the rest of the UK want to see people prosecuted for offensive but non-threatening comments on Twitter and Facebook, it seems a good time to reveal the rest of our findings on matters of law and justice.

Read the rest of this entry →

Freedom of speech has been a very hot topic across the world in the wake of the brutal murder of 12 editorial staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and other related killings. So in our latest poll we thought we’d find out how committed people were to the principle, even in much less deadly situations.

The results were sobering.

Read the rest of this entry →

Keen students of politics can’t have failed to notice a fascinating situation coalescing in the last few months. On current polling, it looks very much like no two of the UK’s four constituent nations will vote for the same party at the forthcoming general election. The Tories are miles ahead in England, in Scotland the SNP lead by even more, Wales is still a Labour stronghold and Northern Ireland continues to do its own thing, split roughly half-and-half along, well, let’s call them “cultural” lines.

So when we decided to conduct another poll with our left-over fundraiser money (start saving now for 2015’s annual grand appeal next month, readers!), we thought it might be interesting to do something that we’re not sure has ever been done before.

We commissioned TWO full-sample polls, one of 1000 people in Scotland and one of 1000 people in the rest of the UK, and we asked them the same questions.

The results we got were fascinating – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, sometimes pleasing and sometimes dismaying. But we’re going to start off with one we really didn’t see coming at all.

Read the rest of this entry →

Wings readership stats for 2014:

Could have done worse.

Read the rest of this entry →