Wings Over Scotland

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.

…for us off their own bat this week, unasked. It’s pretty awesome, though we haven’t the slightest idea what we could use it for. (What it really makes us want is a snazzy 1cm-thick cutout metal version of the logo to use as a poker guard. Anyone?)

But when we have our own nightly current-affairs TV show on an independent Scottish Broadcasting Service, it looks like the intro is pretty much sorted. 🙂

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Supporters of independence are often accused of a certain degree of paranoia when it comes to their lack of trust in the Scottish and UK media.

The above chart is from the latest European Quality Of Life Survey, conducted by an EU agency with the unwieldy but self-explanatory name of The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, (Eurofound for short).

It’s a wide-ranging study with a variety of very interesting findings, but one of the most striking is the almost unique and near-pathological lack of trust in the media held by the UK public. With the exception of Greece, every other nation on the continent has considerably more faith in its press.

It’s not just a cynical British nature – trust in the Parliament and the legal system(s) here are much healthier in comparison to other European nations, but the people of Britain don’t trust their media as far as they could throw it. (Perhaps astonishingly, UK citizens trust politicians significantly MORE than they trust newspapers.)

It’s not just us, readers.

Readers of this site may remember the story published on the BBC earlier this week, where the figures for GDP per capita miraculously switched overnight from showing Scotland as a net contributor to the UK to implying that Scotland was a net recipient.

And after reviewing the data posted by the BBC, it appears that the export figures have also been massaged to imply that Scotland exports vastly less than it does in reality.

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There’s an article on the BBC website today with the self-explanatory title of “Scottish independence: How would the UK fare without Scotland?”

On the left is what it said yesterday (that losing Scotland would be bad for the UK). On the right is what it says today (that losing Scotland would be good for the UK).

Does anyone know what calamity befell Scotland’s economy overnight?

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