Wings Over Scotland

Last night’s bizarre edition of Scotland 2014, in which the three Scottish Labour “leadership” candidates were quizzed by the daughter of a former Labour leader in front of an audience of the candidates’ own supporters (comprising MSPs, councillors and activists), saw all three stick doggedly to what’s clearly going to be the party’s main pitch in the 2015 general election – “Vote SNP, get Tories”.

It’s a line the party has trotted out at every election for decades, and which has been getting pumped out almost daily since Johann Lamont’s resignation – former deputy “leader” Anas Sarwar (who oddly declined to stand for the actual job when it became available) penned a column for the Evening Times on Monday, for example, entitled “Every vote for an SNP candidate is a vote to help elect David Cameron”, and he said the same thing in the Commons this very afternoon.

As alert readers will know, we like to check the facts on these things.

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…is the phrase that was making us chuckle this morning.

It headed an article of disingenuous carping so feeble that we can’t even be bothered archive-linking to it, entitled “Ten SNP Fails Since 2007”, because Margaret is bare down with the kids, innit? But we couldn’t help noticing one of the examples.

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As the Smith Commission continues its fundamentally pointless and impossible deliberations, in which it’s expected to digest and consider many thousands of submissions (including hundreds of detailed ones from political organisations and “civic Scotland”) in around three weeks, the Scottish and UK press is still casually and inaccurately tossing around the term “devo-max”.

There seem to be essentially two competing interpretations of the term – the previously-understood meaning (also known as “Full Fiscal Autonomy”) in which all powers are devolved to Holyrood except foreign affairs and defence, and a new one which simply refers to whatever devolution Westminster is prepared to grant. (Justified semantically by the claim that it’s the maximum devolution Scotland’s going to get.)

So when we commissioned our latest Panelbase poll, we decided that rather than the usual checklist of “which powers should be devolved”, to which the answers have remained the same for years, we’d ask some slightly different questions about the relationship between Holyrood and Westminster, and the process of devolution itself, to see if we could determine what it is that the people of Scotland really want from their Parliament.

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When we commissioned our latest poll, the candidates for the Scottish Labour sort-of leadership hadn’t yet been finalised. In fact, we’re not even sure whether the post of deputy “leader” was up for grabs at that point, with Anas Sarwar having said that he had no intention of stepping down, shortly before stepping down.

But in any event we thought it’d be much more interesting to see who people actually thought should be the leader, rather than just who they regarded as the least-worst option out of whoever put their head above the parapet and took on the least attractive job prospect in Scottish politics.

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As part of our latest Panelbase poll, we wanted to explore the so-called “2017 Scenario” hinted at by new SNP leader and First Minister-elect Nicola Sturgeon, whereby the Tories control the UK parliament, the SNP have another majority at Holyrood, and the UK holds a referendum on the EU where England/the rUK votes to leave and Scotland votes to stay in.

To that end, we asked two key questions. Our findings are below.

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We try to deploy the money that generous readers send us during our fundraisers very carefully, so we were annoyed last week when we commissioned a new opinion poll from Panelbase with a few thousand quid left over from the Wee Blue Book campaign, only to have every other pollster and his dog release the results of their own surveys the very next day.

So sadly (for us) the following figures won’t have quite the dramatic impact that they might have commanded otherwise, but they’re still pretty interesting, particularly in the context of how they relate to the findings from Ipsos MORI, YouGov and others.

(Our poll also covered some ground that nobody else has done, but to add excitement and build a little suspense we’ll save that for a wee bit later on today.)

Let’s get to it, then.

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It’s been a very slow news day today and it’s chucking it down outside, so we found ourselves stuck for entertainment. Earlier this afternoon alert readers will have noticed us tweeting about breaking through 35,000 Twitter followers, and while we were comparing that to various other entities for our own amusement (eg it’s over 10,000 more followers than Scottish Labour, the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Lib Dems put together), we stumbled across this feature from 16 months ago.

And because – as readers of our Panelbase polling features will know – there’s nothing we like more than the occasional wallow in some stats, we got to work.

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Wings stats for September, for those keeping score.

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The rather sour Times leader linked in the tweet doesn’t actually specify the numbers, and the poll isn’t officially released yet as we write this, but we’d been hearing rumours of a Y47 N53 (excl. DKs) for a little while beforehand, so it looks like they were true.

Less than a month ago, YG stood at Y39 N61. If these numbers are confirmed, that’s a colossal 8% swing in three weeks, from the most No-friendly pollster around.

Game, as they say, on.

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Wings Over Scotland officially launched on the 1st of November 2011, with a collection of posts imported from a personal blog. (The first original post didn’t appear until a week later.) It was meant just to be a small aggregator site of interesting stories from the newspapers with a short bit of commentary. That month we had 6,290 pageviews.

We’ve grown a bit since then.

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As readers of this site will be well aware, 40 years ago the UK government economist Professor Gavin McCrone analysed the effect of North Sea oil on the finances of a notional independent Scotland, which at the time seemed a real and possibly even imminent prospect. His assessment was so alarming to Westminster that its findings had to be kept secret from the Scottish public for over three decades.

With the information suppressed, Scotland remained in the UK (and was even refused modest devolution despite voting for it in a referendum), resulting in the imposition of a series of Conservative governments elected on English votes, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s turning-point victory in 1979.

Ironically, we have Mrs Thatcher’s government to thank for the collation of the data which demonstrates the true state of Scotland’s finances within the UK, in the shape of the GERS figures (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland).

The data was subsequently collected into the Scottish National Accounts Project, which provides the figures (Excel document) for the following analysis. What it reveals provides a surprisingly unambiguous statement of Scotland’s financial condition, and one which is agreed across a broader political spectrum that you might imagine.

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Phoebe Arnold on BuzzFeed Politics, 6 August 2014:

“If you minus Scotland’s total tax receipts generated per person since 1980 from the average for the UK, they’ve contributed a surplus of £222 billion in today’s prices (again, counting Scotland’s geographical share of North Sea oil and gas).”

(Source fullfact.org. Our emphasis.)

£222bn divided by 33 years is £6.73bn a year. No biggie. Don’t mention it.